Southerndown is one of the best examples in southern England/Wales of a golf course on what’s called ‘downland,’ land with chalk beneath the topsoil. While much of the land in the UK sits on limestone, Southerndown is unusual in that it has a layer of acidic soil over the alkaline chalk, which means that the course has the benefit of good drainage from the porous chalk. It also means that the site is poor for farmland (most crops like alkaline topsoil) but good for some of the plants that we associate with the impoverished soils of heathlands and links, especially gorse. Of every course that I played in the UK, no course had healthier and more abundant gorse than Southerndown.

So even though it’s surrounded by farmland and covered with grazing animals (Southerndown has the most sheep of any course that I saw), Southerndown plays like a links course. It’s treeless, firm, and surrounded by the thickest gorse that I’ve seen on any course. Although Southerndown isn’t as well-known as its Welsh neighbors Royal Porthcawl and Pennard, I found it to be one of the strongest tests of golf in western England/Wales. The ubiquitous gorse combined with the wind and one of the more interesting sets of greens that I saw in my British golf travels make this course a consistent challenge. While it lacks a bit in hole variety relative to the best courses, it’s a course that I’d be happy to play on a regular basis.


The 365 yard par 4 first hole at Southerndown is reminiscent of its quirky Cotswold neighbors to the east Cleeve Hill and Painswick in that it climbs about 70 ft. from tee to green. It’s pretty wide open so it’s a good test of how solidly you can hit the ball. Hit one a bit weak off the heel and it becomes a par 5.

The long par 4 second was one of my favorite holes in the UK. While there’s a teeing ground near the first green, I’d recommend walking another 50 yards and playing the back tee. The creates the disconcerting, uphill shot that we see in the first photo. While the shot is intimidating, it isn’t so difficult because the fairway is very wide.

The best angle of approach is from the center of the fairway because while there are three bunkers between you and the green from here, they’re well short. Although you can’t see it, the green is open from this angle, with bunkers up the right side on the final approach. I love the simple, lay-of-the-land green and it’s hard to beat the surroundings, looking off over the estuary toward Royal Porthcawl and Swansea.

We’ll encounter a lot of holes like the third in the rest of the round: a medium length par 4 (~400 yards) with several fairway and greenside bunkers. This hole climbs over 50 ft. from tee to green so again, there’s a premium on hitting the ball solidly.

Four is similar to three, but plays downhill and is much easier. The two primary difficulties here are (1) the blind drive over gorse and (2) that the back-right of the green is protected by a mound. This wasn’t an issue for us on this day because the pin was left-center.

The par 3 fifth is probably the most photographed hole at Southerndown and is an excellent 180 yard par 3 with a bit of a redan green. The main thing here is that you don’t want to miss left because the ball will run down the hill.

Six is a very short (460) par 5 but very difficult driving hole, with three bunkers in the middle of the fairway 210-250 from the tee. It was playing down a pretty good wind on this day so after avoiding those bunkers, the main challenge was in holding the green over pot bunkers at the front right. If you had carried the left side of the fairway bunkers, you’d have a more open angle into the green.

Seven is one of the other most-photographed holes at Southerndown and is surely one of the UK’s great long par 3s. There are bunkers close to the green at both the front-right and left, placing an extremely high demand on accuracy for such a long (220 yards) hole. Probably the best thing to do here is underclub and hope that the ground carries the ball to the front of the green.

Eight is another tough mid-length par 4, with bunkers on both sides of the fairway about 270 yards out. The green is protected by hard-to-see bunkers left and right and had some of the most interesting contours of any on the course. Apparently there are several sets of additional tees further back that allow this hole to be stretched to 545—but you could stick a mid-length par 3 between the seventh green and those tees.

Although the par 4 ninth is a bit shorter (just under 350), the bunker scheme is even heavier here, with 3 around the fairway and 4 around the green. The hole played into the wind, so it was difficult to reach the right fairway bunker, 255 from the tee. There’s endless room to the right in the form of the eleventh fairway but the further right that you go, the blinder that your approach becomes over gorse.

The tenth is an excellent medium-short par 3 with a green that pitches steeply from right to left and is shared with the sixteenth green in the back.

I found the next three holes to be a bit of a slog. The eleventh is 410 and was downwind, but there are bunkers in the middle of the fairway at 275 yards, which made it a tough drive. It’s best to place your drive up the left side here as the green angles from front-left to back-right…but that’s also where all the gorse is.

Twelve was just brutal with the wind into and from the left. I aimed my drive over the edge of the gorse on the left and ended up at the edge of the gorse on the right. While this would be a much easier drive without the wind (probably not too common here), there are still fairway bunkers right and left 230 and 250 out. From the 435 yard back tee (not even listed on the card), you’d probably be better off playing back down the eleventh fairway.

The short par 5 thirteenth played straight downwind and like the sixth, is another intimidating driving hole with three bunkers up the left side 240-295 from the medal tees. The further that you go, the more that the worst encroaches from the right. The approach is fairly open with the standard left and right bunkers.

The fourteenth is another excellent par 3 with one of the most unusual but excellent greens that I saw anywhere in the UK. It’s about 50 yards deep and hourglass shaped, being pinched by bunkers in the middle. The back of the green is tougher to hit, but the front has the wildest contours. Although the long holes get a little redundant, Southerndown’s par 3s are world class.

The 365 yard fifteenth is probably the most comfortable driving hole on the course, although there is gorse on the left starting at 240 if you pull it. The yardage guide mentions that Harry Colt had a hand in designing this course and I bet that this hole—with its diagonal line of bunkers 25 yards short of the green—was one of his.

After a few minutes wandering around in the gorse trying to find it, we came to the sixteenth, another difficult, into-the-wind 400 yard par 4. This one is also uphill and played very long. Fortunately, there’s a bit more room off the tee. But the approach is very difficult, with a bunker 30 yards short-left of the green, very near where you’d want to land a run-up shot. Because of this bunker, it’s best to play your drive up the right side of the fairway so that it isn’t in your line and you’re playing your approach into the slope.

Seventeen is not a difficult driving hole, although mounds and rough encroach from the left. It was downwind, so I laid up and still had just a wedge to the green. The green is open in front and has just one bunker to its left. It was nice to have an easier hole after what had been a very difficult back nine to this point.

Eighteen is an oddity: it has a two-tiered fairway with a high-left and low-right side, just like the seventeenth at Pennard (although visible from the tee in this case). A lot of people seem to like this hole and the yardage guide calls it the signature hole, but it wasn’t nearly my favorite on the course.

I suppose that the view of the green is a bit better from the left side but the further you hit it, the more room that there is right than left. Probably the best thing to do is bomb away over the ridge and hope that your ball doesn’t get stuck on it (it shouldn’t).

Because of the wind, narrowness, and gorse, I found Southerndown to be one of the most mentally taxing courses that I’ve played. It’s very demanding off the tee. The yardage guide is essential here because the bunkers tend not to be built up and many are not visible, especially off the tee. But it’s an excellent test of golf for good golfers. I played a combination of the white and yellow tees so the course probably only played about 6,200 and to par 70, but that was plenty enough. From the tips, the course stretches to 6,650 yards and the three longest holes play downwind, so it’d be par 68 for tournament golf. I’m not sure that I’ve seen a more difficult course than that one would be.

While the spring and early summer of 2016 were fairly wet in southern England and Wales and the ground was playing like a parkland course, Google Earth shows the course pretty baked out. I can’t imagine playing it on a windy day in those conditions. There isn’t enough room here for both wind and peak links firmness. If you play it in those conditions, you’ll have to adapt your game like Tiger did in the 2006 Open at Hoylake, clubbing down off the tee and playing for substantial runout. Like Rye and probably a few other links courses, you face the ‘Links Trilemma’ at Southerndown in which you can only ever have two of the three: wind, firmness, and hitting your driver.

In short, Southerndown is an excellent test of golf. The lack of variety in the bunker schemes and the modest terrain probably keep it out of the top tier of courses that I played in England and Wales, but there are several outstanding holes, especially the long par 4 second and the par 3s. I’d love to be a member at a course like this because from top to bottom (both in terms of clubs and parts of your body…), it gives your game a thorough workout. It’s like a golf boot camp.

Although it’s probably true of a few of the other courses that I played while I lived in London, I certainly wouldn’t have known about Painswick if it hadn’t been for years of lurking on the discussion forum of Golf Club Atlas. There’s always been a large contingent of UK-based golfers who sought out all these odd little old courses that never make any lists and posted pictures of them. And while we don’t have courses like Royal St. George’s or Swinley Forest in the US, these quirky little English country courses would be even more foreign to American golfers. They’re not going to tolerate a opening drive where the landing area is 65 ft. above the tee or a 115 yard uphill blind par 3. And liability issues would certainly prevent the crossover holes, shared fairways, and a par 4 where the main driving hazard is a country road intersection.

But you find all of that at Painswick, which makes one of the courses that I’d most recommend to American golfers visiting England. Most of them wouldn’t like it, but it’s completely unlike anything they’ll see at home. And after all isn’t travel supposed really to be about experiencing and learning from new things? Everything shouldn’t just be checking boxes off a list or humble bragging Instagram posts. We should try to experience and absorb unusual things, even if they’re not on any lists. Just like art and music would be boring if they were just Michelangelo and Mozart, golf would be far less interesting if it were just manicured top 100 courses. We could all use a little grit and funk in our lives.

Having said that, Painswick has at least a half-dozen of the best holes that I’ve played. It doesn’t quite work as a full golf course because at par 67 but only 4,800 yards, most of the par 4s are very short. And as individually odd and brilliant as some of them are, the lack of variety does hurt the course. But again, not every course needs to be a championship course. And those 150 yard carries are a challenge for a lot of younger, older, and female golfers—and probably almost golfers when the course opened in 1891.


The 220 yard par 4 first hole is one of the wonders of the golf world…but not really in a good way. From tee to green, it’s 95 ft. uphill, but there’s a quarry about 160 yards off the tee that runs up to the front of the green. The quarry is 80 ft. above the teeing ground. So what you want to do is either try to blast a drive onto the green or hit something about 150…which probably plays more like 190. Both times I played it, I chunked my 4-iron into the side of the hill and had about 75 yards. Not what I was trying to do, but it worked just fine.

At 330, the second is one of the most normal par 4s on the course. The drive is about 25 ft. uphill, so it’s tough to reach the blind quarry about 245 yards out on the right side. You want to hug the tree line on the left because you’ll have a better view and angle to the small green. And be careful as you walk to the fairway; the fourteenth hole plays into this fairway from the opposite direction. Hopefully if you play, there are more hikers than golfers, as there were on this day (a major regional hiking path runs through the middle of the course).

The downhill third is one of Painswick’s many great drivable par 4s. The fairway (shared with thirteen) is wide, but the angle to the green is very difficult if you are right of the right edge of the green. That’s because the green is benched into a hill and pitches hard right-to-left.

Four is an interesting experience: you drive under a power line and directly over the thirteenth tee, 75 yards ahead. This hole is a favorite of many because it plays much longer than the 295 on the card and a miss right leaves a very difficult approach. On a course with many lovely green sites, this is one of the best.

It’s hard to find fitting words to describe the fifth hole. I’ve already described the first as one of the wonders of the golf world. This hole is certainly that too. And maybe also one of the wonders of the archaeology world—it plays 115 yards, 40 feet uphill into a 1st century BC (pre-Roman) fort. You certainly can’t see that in the US. Consider a day at Painswick to have also been a day at a museum.

The sixth is the second of three consecutive par 3s and is considered by Tom Doak and others to be one of the UK’s great par 3s. I agree. It plays just over 200 yards downhill and the approach into the green is split into a low left road and a high right one bisected by a rough covered ridge. I’m a bit skeptical about the possibility of running the ball onto the green on the high right side because it’s narrow and there isn’t enough slope toward the green. The ball wasn’t bouncing anywhere in southern England in July 2016 but even if it were firm, I think that a shot played that way would just bound into junk right of the green. Still, it’s a great all-carry drop shot par 3.

Seven is third consecutive par 3 that plays out the other side of the fort about 150 yards downhill to a deep, skinny green that slopes away. While less heralded than the two previous holes, this one is very different and I liked it.

If you can find it, the eighth is the first of Painswick’s consecutive (and only) par 5s. The area in front of the tee was overgrown and there was a lot more room left than appears here. Although the course is hard to decipher on Google Earth, it appears that the ideal line is directly over the clump of bushes in the left of this frame. The approach plays over the middle of the hiking path to a small sunken green.

Nine plays back parallel to the eighth and again, the drive is deceptive. If possible, you want to go right over the large ash tree about 150 yards from the tee on the right side. This will put you in the right side of the fairway with a clear view of the green.

The approach is strange even for this course. The last 125 yards run through a shaped valley that is less than 20 yards wide. The sides are thick rough and there are random birch trees, first right then left. I couldn’t reach the green and I didn’t think that I could hit the narrow layup area, so I just blasted a 4-iron into the open area behind the seventh green to the right. That worked, but it left a partially blind shot over the edge of some trees. It’s just a very strange hole, although I think it’d work a bit better if they removed some of the birch trees.

Ten is a softer version of five with a convex green that’s nominally about 1,000 sq. ft. but has about 200 sq. ft. of effective pinable area.

Although it doesn’t seem to get much love, eleven is one of my favorite short par 4s anywhere. It’s only 246 on the card, but it’s at least 25 ft. uphill and plays much longer. You can see the right side of the fairway but you don’t want to hit it there because it’s only about 160 to the end of the fairway and the approach from there is blind with a poor angle. Instead, you want to go over the peak of the grassy hill. It’s only about 165 to reach the fairway on this line, although it seems a lot further. You can also miss left because there’s a second, lower tier of rough/fairway. You can also go directly for the green, but a less-than-perfect shot will probably result in a lost ball.

The twelfth is 4 yards longer on the card, but plays about 45 ft. downhill off the side of the fort and is therefore a par 3. The grass was so soft that I couldn’t even get my ball to run down the hill onto the green but in a dry summer, it might be almost impossible to keep your tee shot out of the woods behind it.

Thirteen is about 380 yards and probably the most normal par 4 at Painswick. It’s a tough driving hole because the fairway narrows between trees right and the property line of a landscape rock supply company at about 245 yards. The approach plays about 25 ft. uphill and was the only par 4 on the course to which I needed to hit something longer than a wedge.

Playing diagonally across a quarry, the fourteenth is a great hole for anyone who hits the ball ~215 yards or less. The furthest point on the left is about a 180 yard carry. It’s only about a 140 yard carry to the right, but your ball could run through the fairway into the woods in firm conditions. For longer hitters, just bomb away over the furthest point of the quarry. If you can’t reach the green (~290 yards), try to get your drive closer to the woods for a better angle.

Fifteen is a lovely downhill par 3 into a small dell. It’d help if they removed some of the overgrowth between the tee and green but at the same time, it contributes to the rustic feel of the course.

Sixteen is another very short downhill par 4 which was easy for me, but created a lot of trouble for Bob, who only drives it about 175 yards. The fairway is in two sections; the first runs from about 150-180 yards and leaves a mostly blind shot unless you’ve left it in line with a small gap. For us longer hitters, it’s about a 215 yard carry over mounds and a road. From there, it runs downhill to the green and if you hit your drive straight, you should be able to reach.

Now we come to one of my favorite holes in the world: the intersection hole, a 363 yard par 4. It’s best to start with an overview of the hole because it’s a bit tough to see what’s going on from the tee. The drive plays over a road to a fairway that runs at a diagonal to the left toward the green but is pitched left to right. The safe drive is to the right, but this leaves a long second and if it’s firm, the ball can easily run through the fairway into the boundary junk.

​So what you want to do is aim further left, near the tree line (protecting an old cemetery). Right at the corner of the tree line is the aforementioned intersection, about 215 yards from the tee. You either want to play something about 230 yards to the right of this or hit a drive that must carry at least 240 right over it. If you layup, the closer you get to the road running parallel to the line of the drive, the shorter the approach that you’ll have. I hit a perfect layup and had a wedge in my first round but pushed my tee shot and had a 6-iron in my second. It’s very important to have a manageable distance for your approach because there little rough-covered mounds around much of the green.

If you try to drive over the corner of the intersection and push your drive, your ball might just run down the road into the next county. I’ve never seen a hole with so many interesting driving options. This hole offers something interesting for every length hitter. Even the longest hitter, for whom the 240 intersection carry isn’t a big deal must take care that they don’t push their drive into the junk short-right of the green. This must be on any short list of the greatest driving holes (ha ha ha…) in the world.

And after that, the 140 yard eighteenth over a scraggly oak tree is a pretty disappointing finish. But there’s a pretty good left-to-right pitch in this green and a miss left or long will leave a very tricky shot.

Painswick’s motto (which I just learned from looking at the scorecard) is facta non verba or ‘actions, not words.’ It sounds more fitting for some haughty aristocratic family than this modest, $20/round country course (and there wasn’t even anyone around to take our green fees for our second 18). But (1) one of my friends who’s from this area told me that this is actually a very Tory place (I would have never guessed) and (2) I can’t think of a course that embodies this principle in the sense that it’s so much more than what’s on the scorecard. 4,831 yards par 67 doesn’t sound very impressive but as we’ve seen in this photo retrospective, there are many great holes, many of which include features which may be unique to the world of golf.

I’m not sure how you say ‘English Eccentric’ in Latin, but that’s what Painswick is and I mean that in the best possible way because I love English eccentrics. It breaks pretty much every modern rule of what a golf course should be. Holes run straight up hills, many are blind, many run down the same fairway as another. The course is shared with hikers, people on horseback, and even automobiles. It would be extremely dangerous if there were ever more than a handful of people playing it.

I guess that the whole thing was summed up by an elderly, very English hiker that I encountered when I was playing the twelfth hole. He told me that he used to play the course back in the day and that he found it ‘rather sporting.’ If you’re familiar with English upper-classese, you know that this means something between ‘silly’ and ’absolutely fucking bonkers.’

Now many people might find that to be a bad thing. But in these days of green reading books and the Trackman, it’s refreshing to see a course that abides by a different set of standards. One that’s as interesting—if not more interesting—for seniors and children than low handicappers. One that flouts the safety norms of contemporary litigious society. One where the golf course seems an almost incidental part of the landscape rather than something imposed on it.

All the great holes aside, it’s the latter aspect of Painswick that I love most. It feels more like a hiking trail with some cut grass on which you can hit a golf ball around than a golf course with a hiking trail through it. And golf would be a much better game—and much less maligned by the rest of society—if courses tried to be like this rather than the artificial imposition and nonsense that most of them are.

Cleeve Hill was that the first course that I played with my traveling golf buddy Bob on our 13 day, 12 course tour of southwest England and Wales in July 14. It was also my first real introduction to a very foreign-to-Americans concept: a golf course played over multi-purpose common ground (common as in non-privately owned). At 1,080 ft. (with the summit just behind the eighth green), Cleeve Hill is the highest point in the Cotswolds and golfers share it with hikers, bikers…and a lot of sheep. Some of the Surrey heathland courses (including, of all places, Sunningdale) are also partly on common ground but there, golfers are sharing the space with at most a few rich neighborhood dog walkers. I suspect that the number of hikers/bikers often exceeds the number of golfers on Cleeve Hill. I’m certain that the number of sheep always does.

Being the highest point in the Cotswolds, you’d correctly suspect that Cleeve Hill is quite a hike. It’s certainly the hilliest course that I’ve ever seen where everyone playing it is walking. Americans would never walk this course—they can’t even be bothered to walk the flat local muni.

But that imbues this course with a feel that I would get a few more times over the next two weeks, though never as strongly as here: of golf as an adventure. There’s about 225 ft. between the lowest and highest points on the property (behind the first green/thirteenth fairway), but it’s not all straight up and down, so you’ll hike a few thousand vertical feet during your round. Save for a few windswept trees, the property and most of its surroundings are treeless, so you can see for miles across the Cotswolds and down to nearby Cheltenham and other towns. The ground is rocky and many of the paths have washed out channels, so pushing your trolley becomes a sport unto itself. And if the weather isn’t cooperative, playing golf here would be about as sporting as anything I could imagine…the probability of injury would probably be just shy of MMA.


The par 5 first gives you a pretty good sense of the course: a blind shot over a hill with an aiming post. While you don’t get a good sense of what’s going on, it looks like there’s more danger left than right. This is correct but especially if you’re a long hitter, you don’t want to be coming in from the right side because the green is narrow and one of the course’s few bunkers is to its right. It’s much better to approach this green from the left. That’s another common theme of Cleeve Hill: many holes are almost endlessly wide, but you’re much better off if you’re in a certain part of the fairway.

The second may be the longest 350 yard hole that I’ve ever played. It’s also a contender for most severe reverse camber fairway, with the hole running to the left but the slope of the hill running to the right. A weak drive will get destroyed by the hill and you’ll end up in the first fairway with a very long shot to the tiny, rudimentary green.

The 290 yard third competes with the first hole at our next stop Painswick for steepest uphill drive. According to Google Earth, it’s about 60 ft. uphill from the tee to the landing area (I barely cleared it with my 2-hybrid). It’s better to err a bit left than right of the aiming post here because the left side is open and there’s gorse on the right side of the fairway. The view up to the green is clearer from the left and there are mounds/hollows short-right of the green.

We reach one of the high plateaus for the fourth and fifth holes and these are two more holes with almost endless room, but where you must be careful. If you hit a hook on the par 5 fourth, you may end up a few dozen yards down the hill to the left. Like at the first, the green is narrow and deep, placing a premium on having a good angle (in this case, middle of the fairway). The green is two-tiered and surrounded by an ugly, but effective horseshoe mound.

The 350 yard par 4 fifth plays back down the right side of the fourth. It’s a very clever hole because while it’s endlessly wide to the right, a slice will run to the right, into the fourth fairway, leaving a long shot and very awkward angle into the tiered green. It’s an outstanding driving hole because it’s important to keep your drive up the left side—near the long grass and gorse.

Six is an excellent short par 3 where there’s even more danger than appears.

The long par 4 seventh was one of my favorite holes in England. This is one of the few blind driving holes that becomes better with repeat play. The reason for this is that the hole doglegs gently right and while there’s endless room left, the further left you go, the longer the approach becomes. So you want to keep it to the right…except that there’s a hidden quarry running out to about 260 yards. One of the main hiking paths crosses 20 yards short of the green so check to see if there are any oncoming hikers before you hit your approach—they most likely don’t know that they’re walking into the middle of a golf hole.

The 390 yard eighth is another 60 ft. uphill hike so you’d better hit a solid drive. This is one of the widest fairways on the course but like many holes at Cleeve Hill, you must hit your drive solid or the hill will just eat your ball up and leave you with a very long approach. I can’t think of another course where slopes in and around fairway make such effective driving hazards.

After you putt out, you might want to head to the summit of Cleeve Hill (just behind the green) and take a picture. But if like me you’re more interested in taking photographs of golf holes than general scenery, you might want to proceed to the medium-long par 4 ninth tee and take a picture here. It’s certainly one of the most dramatic holes that I’ve seen. It’s also very difficult because the fairway is narrow and slopes severely right-to-left. Another narrow but deep green makes this one of the toughest holes on the course.

The 220 yard tenth plays over 50 ft. downhill. There’s little trouble around the green but it’s easy to become distracted by the spectacular surroundings.

The 350 yard eleventh is uphill, but not as severely as some of the holes on the front nine. The fairway is nominally narrow but the sheep have done an excellent job maintaining the rough here and you can bomb away.

The 390 twelfth is a very good par 4. It bends gently to the left while the fairway slopes away to the right. At about 260 yards out, there are small rough-covered ridges on both sides of the fairway to keep you honest. I don’t have a photograph, but the green is kind of L-shaped, with the right side lower than the left.

The par 5 thirteenth is one of the most spectacular and best holes at Cleeve Hill. There’s a rough-filled pit in the right-center of the fairway which is about a 230 yard carry. If you can manage to hit it 290, you reach the crest of the fairway which, according to Google Earth, is also the highest point on the golf course.

From here, it’s about 200 yards downhill to one of the most unusual greens/greensites that I’ve seen. The T-shaped green is set in an old rampart consisting of two parallel walls and a trench. The base of the T is cut into the first wall while the wider back of the green sits in the trench. If you’re laying up, it’s important to walk up to the crest of the fairway to see the location of the flag on the green. The lay-up area is endlessly wide but you’ll want to play to the right if the flag is in the back-left and vice versa.

I really liked the long, uphill par 4 fourteenth. The drive is about 25 ft. uphill, but the crest is only about 160 yards off the tee. After that, the wide fairway runs gently downhill to my favorite greensite on the course. There are mounds left and right, but the green itself appeared to be completely natural.

While there have been several literal and figurative high points so far, the back-to-back par 3 fifteenth and sixteenth might be the winner in the latter category. Both play over an old quarry, which hopefully provides more visual than shotmaking excitement. The fifteenth is only about 150 yards and the green is set about 15 yards past the quarry so it shouldn’t come into play. But for plenty, it will. Like the fourteenth green, this one is set beautifully against the hill behind it.

Sixteen is about 190 yards, uphill, and much more difficult. It’s quite visually intimidating hitting over all of this long grass into the narrow saddle in which the green is sited. The green has a substantial percentage of the course’s bunkers (3) on its left and right. They’re completely unnecessary and look out of place. If there were ever a course that didn’t need bunkers, it’s Cleeve Hill.

The 400 seventeenth plays about 50 ft. downhill. A long hitter could probably reach the green in the summertime but there’s a hidden quarry on the right about 290 yards out that will catch even a slight push.

Now we come to the last which, unfortunately, was my least favorite hole on the course. It’s about a 125 yard walk from the seventeenth green to the tee. Two rough-filled trenches cross the fairway at 235 and 260 yards. I couldn’t carry the latter, so I decided to try and play around them up the hill on the right. Not a great idea—there’s enough rough up there that the ball didn’t kick back right and it left me a very awkward angle to another narrow green built on a shelf with a ridge running along the right side.

I’m not sure that it’s a bad hole, it’s just very awkward for someone who hits the ball 250-260 on average because we can’t carry the ridges. But a drive of 225 yards would leave about 160 with a good angle. Maybe that’s the best way to play it. If you can carry it 250, it’s a pretty easy hole.

While golf has been played here since the late 19th century when Old Tom Morris laid out the original course, the club has fallen on hard times recently and is scheduled to have its lease revoked by the local council on March 31, 2021. Since this announcement, the course’s plight has drawn attention from around the golf world on social media and it appears that there’s a concerted effort to save the course. The main necessity appears to be the need to build a new clubhouse, as the one is in serious disrepair. There was a call out for bids that closed in December 2020 and the new owner will be announced on January 30, 2021.

It would, of course, be tragic to lose such a historic and interesting golf course. While it’s the sense of adventure for which I’ll best remember Cleeve Hill, there are several excellent holes here as well. The par 3s are an excellent set and I thought that others—5, 7, 13, and 14—were among the best in England (7 is a truly great hole). So it’s not just a stunning and sporting place; it’s a legit excellent golf course.

At the same time, of every course in the world that might close, this might be the one where’d you’d least be able to tell that the course had closed. Pretty much the only thing that would happen would be that the greens would grow to be the same length as everything else. With all the grazing livestock, trees and gorse will probably never grow on the course. It’s common land and a popular sports/tourism site, so it’ll never be sold for development. I suspect that if the course were to go fallow, it’d still be recognizable and you’d still be able to play it from tee to green 25 years later.

But it looks like there’s reason for optimism with Cleeve Hill. The place gets a lot of love from a small group of golf course architecture aficionados who proclaim it to be one of the best of a class of under-appreciated English courses: the rustic, sheep-maintained, common ground course. These courses are well-represented in the greater Cotswolds area and include the next course on my to-review list Painswick and Minchinhampton Old and Kignton, which I haven’t seen.

While these courses have their questionable holes and your golf shoes get pretty dirty when you play them, they have a charm that you’ll never get from a course with a blue-blooded architectural pedigree and a new money maintenance budget. And with no irrigation or need for fertilizer, these courses are about as natural and environmentally friendly as you can get. As an exemplar of that category, Cleeve Hill is worth preserving. In this age of greater environmental sensitivity and (especially going forward) water conservation, the game has a lot to learn from places like Cleeve Hill. If golf courses were more like Cleeve Hill, maybe the game wouldn’t have the reputation for wastefulness that it—fairly—has. If golf courses were more like Cleeve Hill, maybe the game would be able to attract some of the people—outdoor sporting/conservation types—that it currently repels. Hopefully the new owners will keep it in this spirit.

Among the London area heathland courses that are the sole work of H.S. Colt (so not including Sunningdale’s Old Course), Swinley Forest is usually considered the best. Colt referred to it as his ‘least bad course,’ which, given that he was an Englishman who went to Cambridge, is Muhammad Ali-level self-promotion.

Whether or not the modesty was faux, it’s hard to argue with Colt. The course is the real deal. I do think that it takes a few holes to get going. There were a few times in the first six holes when I was wondering what all the fuss was about. But once I reached the seventh tee, there were no more questions. The middle six holes (7-12) compete favorably with the middle stretch on Sunningdale’s Old Course for the best six hole stretch that I played in England. It has some of the quirk of the Old’s middle six with two uphill (one blind) holes and possibly the two best long par 4s that I’ve seen. And while not as brilliant as the middle of the course, the finish is as solid as you could want. Like so many of the other English courses with par<70, Swinley Forest (6,430 yards, par 69) plays like a championship course.

It was clear at the time of my visit in July 2018 that the club had been taking some measures to ‘improve’ the golf course, adding back tees and heather-covered mounds around several of the greens. I guess that it’s possible that the heather-covered mounds were a restoration of the original design, but I doubt this. It struck me as part of a trend that I’d seen at other heathland courses to frame everything with heather, a lot of which I think is unnecessary. There’s good balance in Colt’s green sites. As he liked to do, several are benched into or perched on the edge of hills and misses leave difficult pitches. Other greens are on more modest ground and the shaping is simple for a reason: these green sites (1,3,6,14) balance out the more challenging ones (4,7,9,17). Adding mounds around some of the simpler green sites disrupts the balance that Colt built into the course.

Even more concerning are pictures that I’ve seen of the course since my visit. It looks like the club has completely redone the bunkering on the famous par 3 seventeenth and added mounds/heather to the left side of the seventh green. I’m a bit worried that with these alterations, the club may be inadvertently testing the robustness of Colt’s famous statement.


Swinley Forest starts with a hole that wouldn’t be out of place at the beginning of a Ross course: a ~400 yard, wide open par 4. The bunker on the right is about 300 yards from the tips, but would definitely come into play for longer hitters in these perfect summer conditions. The green is open in front and modest; anything in/near the fairway leaves a straight-forward approach. The bunker left is about 30 yards short of the green.

The short par 4 second features an up-and-over blind drive so typical of English courses. The fairway jogs to the right but slopes right-to-left, so it’s important to start your drive up the right or hit a fade. The approach is downhill over a creek to a big, fairly flat green with interesting, original looking earthworks short left and right and what look to be newer (the heather and turf appeared to be newly planted) and less appealing mounds behind the green.

The drivable par 4 third is quite modest. It isn’t the widest fairway, but there isn’t a lot of trouble around it. There also isn’t much trouble around the bunkerless green, although short grass-covered mounds at the front left and right plus gradual tilt to the back make approach shots tricky if you haven’t left yourself a good yardage.

Much less modest is the famous par 3 fourth. This is a classic Colt par 3 with its green benched into a hill and diagonal fronting bunkers. I’ve seen it called a redan but I don’t think that that’s right because while the green angles from front-right to back-left, the back-left is the highest point and there are no mounds at the front-right to feed your ball onto the green. But that doesn’t matter; it’s still a beautiful—and very tough—hole.

Five is a modest length par 5 but I found it to be tricky because the fairway slopes toward the bunkers on the right, ~230-265 from the tee. If you hit the fairway, it’s no trouble to carry the pond and creek 100 yards short of the green. This green also appeared to have gotten the recent mounds-and-heather treatment although I thought that the work here blended in a bit better with the surroundings than that on two.

Six is a flat long par 4 where diagonal rough/heather up the left side is the primary driving hazard. The approach to the green is a bit deceptive as both bunkers are set a few yards short of the putting surface. I thought that the shaping on and around this green was excellent—modest, but enough to be interesting.

The first six holes are solid but with the exception of the par 3 fourth, nothing too special. That mix of solid/special is inverted for the next run of six holes. The medium-long seventh was one of my favorite holes in England. The drive is gradually uphill and if you’re playing the back tees, the fairway is interrupted at about 280 by three heather-covered ridges. You’ll want to the high left corner to shorten the approach and improve the angle.

The approach is all-England, both in style and greatness: uphill and blind over a large crossing bunker. Unless you’ve hit a poor drive or hit a very poor second, the bunker shouldn’t come into play as it’s 40 yards short of the green. But appropriately given the difficulty of the shot, there isn’t any other trouble short of the green. There’s big trouble right in the form of bunkers and—at least in 2018—rhododendrons right of the green.

Since my visit, the club has removed the rhododendrons on the hill to the right of this green and added the heather-covered mounds left. The former change is a good one as a miss right before was a guaranteed lost ball. But the added mounds left are disturbing because that was the side on which to miss—a shot from over there was playable, yet tricky. Now misses left and right will both be penalizing. It’ll still be an excellent hole because you have a lot of latitude to miss wide if you’re short. But I liked the look of the minimal shaping and the trickiness-without-difficulty, so for me, it’s an unfortunate change.

I’m not a big fan of the short par 3 eighth, with its very modern-looking (i.e. mound-surrounded) green. But the green itself is interesting and you can get yourself into all kinds of trouble if you miss right.

As much as I love the seventh, I think that the long par 4 ninth (~465) is even better. This must be one of the world’s best long par 4s. From the tips, it’s about a 235 yards carry over the bunker in the center-left of the fairway. If the course is soft and you can carry this bunker, the drive is no big deal. But if it’s firm, you have to be very careful not to run through the fairway into one of the heather-covered ridges on the right, the first being ~290 out.

While the hole doglegs left and a drive up the left shortens the approach, you want to drive it up the right—ideally as close to the heather-covered ridges as you can. That’s because the green is open at its front-right while the entire left side is covered with junk. Long is also terrible so it’s really important to err short and right here. This is tougher to do if you’re in the left side of the fairway because you’re playing into the narrower aspect of this area short of the green.

n.b. This is another hole where the approach reminds me of that on the fifth at Pinehurst no. 2. I think that this hole is even better.

I’m a sucker for a long par 3 where you can run the ball onto the green and ten meets my criteria. The first bunker is about 30 yards short of the green. If you get something running at the right side of the green, there are small mounds that can feed your ball back onto it.

There are two sets of tee boxes on the short par 4 eleventh and this is one place where what I suspect is recent (or at least post-Colt) work is an improvement. Tom Doak’s yellow Confidential Guide listed this hole as 277 yards, which is the teeing ground right behind the tenth green. I suspect that this is the original tee. From here the hole is straight-away, flat, and only modestly interesting due to bunkers.

But now there’s a second teeing ground about 60 yards back down a hill. This creates another of the English uphill, blind drives that I love so much. And there’s just the right amount of visual cue here—you can see the top of the first fairway bunker, which is about a 200 yard carry. But there are two more blind fairway bunkers, one ~235 on the right and another on the left ~225 out. A long hitter could blast it over all of these and go for the green, although there are two more bunkers ~30-50 yards short of the green on the right. For the rest of us, it’s very demanding driving hole.

As brilliant as the ninth hole is, the S-shaped, long par 4 twelfth may be even better. The drive is semi-blind over a topped-shot bunker but you can just make out the principal challenges: bunkers right and left, about 250 and 275 yards from the back tee respectively. This was a very tough driving hole in these conditions because anything straight would end up in the right bunker (or right of it as I found…) and anything with a draw would likely run into the left bunker. A draw is important because the trees are tight to the line of play on the left.

The approach to the green is in the small handful of best par 4 approach shots that I’ve seen. After bending left in the driving zone, the hole now bends back right, with a long diagonal bunker up to 30 yards short of the green. But if you’ve hit a shorter drive, you can use the heaving contours short and left of the green to feed the ball onto the green (at least when it’s firm like this). The ridges short of this green reminded me of a links course.

The appealing mid-length par 3 thirteenth has a small green fronted by three big bunkers. It also features a new (and less appealing) asphalt cart path.

Fourteen plays just under 400 yards and isn’t one of the more noteworthy holes on the course. But that just shows how strong this course is because it’s still very good. The first bunker on the left is a perfect aiming point. You want to keep your drive up the left because (1) there’s a bunker on the right about 240 out and (2) the green opens up from the left. The approach over the heather is very attractive, as is the flat ground that leads into the green on the other side.

Fifteen is another hole with new back tees. It used to be a par 4 of 450 yards; now it’s a par 5 of 510. The fairway bunkers are still a short carry—only about 215 yards. After that, the fairway is wide open. The principal challenge here is on the approach to the green: anything short can roll 20-30 yards back down the fairway. But you can also use the bank short right to feed the ball onto the green.

I found the 415 yard sixteenth to be very difficult. Though the drive isn’t blind, you can’t see any of the fairway. The fairway starts to narrow past the first fairway bunker on the left, 210 yards out. A miss here is severe as the left side of the fairway is all heather and right it runs down into the woods. The green is narrow, deep, and two-tiered, with about a 5 ft. rise between them.

The 190 yard seventeenth had the potential to be another round killer if you got too aggressive and missed its small green right or long. But this didn’t bother me because a miss short would leave a simple uphill pitch.

But things are different now. For some reason, the club decided that this hole needed a total makeover and replaced the steep bunkers with much friendlier, Rees Jones-style bunkers. It also looks like they built up both the left and right sides of the green, which both had sharp drop offs when I played but now look to have been filled in. To be honest, I don’t think that the new version looks bad, I just don’t understand why they felt that they needed to change the old one. It certainly doesn’t look like they improved upon it. I wonder what Colt would think?

I think that the 405 yard back tees on eighteen are also new and while the hole is very difficult from here, I like it. It starts with a diagonal drive over a creek. Up the left it’s only a 200 yard carry but it’s a 230 carry on the right side and the creek continues to run up the right side of the fairway. So erring left is safer…except for the bunker 240 out. You have about 40 yards between this bunker and the creek. While the uphill approach isn’t too difficult, the drive is killer…if you weren’t already dead after playing sixteen.

Because of the club’s exclusive reputation, it wasn’t until near the end of my three year stay in London that I tried to play here. But I’m really glad that I did because for me, Swinley Forest is comfortably one of the top 3 London heathland courses (with Sunningdale Old and West Sussex). It has two of three of the best holes in southern England, while the supporting cast is mostly strong and always beautiful. And I was surprised by how difficult the course was. Clearly the club has contributed to this with back tees. I think that it was listed at just over 6,000 yards in the yellow Confidential Guide. Now it’s over 6,400. But while the course definitely doesn’t feel short, most of the difficulty comes from narrowing landing areas and Colt’s small, perched greens.

In addition to being a great golf course, Swinley Forest is a joy to experience. There were a few people finishing up when I went out, but I had the course to myself for both of my rounds. It’s probably the most charming clubhouse of any place that I visited in England. They had one of the best lunches too. Everything was close to perfect just the way it was. Most would be (rightly) content with far less.

It took me quite a while to get to West Sussex Golf Club. Of the London area heathland gems, it’s the one that requires the most expansive interpretation of ‘area,’ being much closer to the southern coast than the city. Its relative remoteness has meant that it has received far less attention than Sunningdale, Swinley Forest, or Walton Heath—although those who do visit tend to leave impressed.

So the combination of the distance plus the relative privateness—this is the only time that I was asked about a club affiliation when inquiring about playing—meant that West Sussex was one of the last places that I visited (Aug. 2018) during my three year stay in London (Sep. 2015-Sep. 2018). And I’m really glad that I waited because (1) the course was in absolutely peak summer condition (as will be clear from the first photo) and (2) I thought that this was easily one of the three best of the London area heathland courses and it was nice to have saved something so good for last.

One thing for which I was completely unprepared was how difficult this course was. Along with the Addington, Rye, and Swinley Forest (among others), West Sussex is one of the great sub-par-70 English courses, weighing in at 6,350 yards with a par of 68. And like Rye, the par could easily be 67 because the par 5 first hole is just a long par 4 by today’s standards. So although West Sussex seems short when looking at the card, it isn’t because it takes a lot of long par 4s to get to 6,350 yards when there are basically no par 5s.

And even apart from length, West Sussex is probably the most demanding test of driving of any course that I played in the UK. Several holes have fairway bunkers right where you want to place your drive. Many fairways are narrow and if you try stay away from the bunkers, the heather is very thick and almost always tight to the fairway. There are also a few uphill, blind drives. The approaches to the greens are no less demanding although like most heathland courses, the green contours are modest.

And then setting aside what a great test of golf it is, I don’t think that I’ve ever played a course that was as pleasant and idyllic as West Sussex. It’s a beautiful place to play golf, especially if the heather’s in bloom—which it might have been when I was there if it hadn’t been burnt up by the weeks-long streak of hot, dry weather in southern England in the summer of 2018. It’s also as good of a walk as I’ve seen. The terrain is modest, the green—tee distances are short, and there are several possibilities for sub-18 hole loops. I suspect that the nine hole loop 1-7, 17-18 would be one of the world’s two or three best nine hole courses.


The first hole at West Sussex is the course’s only par 5 and I’ve seen it referred to as a weak starting hole. This must have been before member/golf course architect Donald Steel’s bunker enhancements because despite its lack of length (485 from the tips), it’s a sternly bunkered and interesting hole. The bunkers on the left are between from ~250-285 from the medal tees (+30 from the tips), so you’d need a very good drive to clear them.

The approach is between staggered bunkers but the one on the right is about 40 yards short of the green and the land tilts gently left so if you carry this bunker, your ball will likely feed onto the green (and if you push it, you’ll take someone out on the fourth tee). I thought that it was an excellent opening hole.

The second is a medium-long par 4 with a tough drive between a dip into the woods on the left and a sea of heather on the right. I played my second round with a member who told be that there used to be another back tee about 40 yards further back behind the entrance drive and that the club was thinking of restoring it. This hole gave me enough trouble as it was (two drives into the heather), but it might be a good idea for the protein shake crowd. The green was very simple with a nice collection area at its right.

Standing on the third tee, we can see that despite the short yardage on the card, this course is no joke off the tee. The first three holes are all very stern tests of driving. The first bunker is only about a 150 yard carry. The issue is with the next two, which require about 235 to carry. If you can do that, you’ll have an ideal angle into this deep but narrow green. While the fairways were (obviously) very firm, the greens and approaches were soft, so I was able to stop my wedge on the fairway from the left side of the fairway. Still, there’s a lot more leeway if you’re approaching from the right.

I really liked the awkwardness of the 385 yard fourth. There’s a bit more visibility from the medal tees but from the tips, the fairway is obscured by heather and turns left around two bunkers. You really have to commit to a line and make a smooth swing. But you also don’t want to go more than about 240 off the tee. The approach is a beauty although I suspect that it would look even better if they took out the row of pines just left of the green.

Five and six are, I think, fairly described as British counterparts to fifteen and sixteen at Cypress Point. These are two great par 3s; the first short, the second long. Both are also very interesting from a strategic perspective. While five is only about 155 yards, there’s great peril left of the green and it isn’t smart to aim at pins over there. You can play at a flag on the right side but if it’s on the left, just play to the center.

I’ve read several comments that the sixth was originally a short par 4 and the member with whom I played said the same thing. It’s a 110 yard walk from the fifth green to the sixth tee and there’s what I’m certain is an old tee box about 50 yards behind the fifth green (I should have gotten a picture). It must have been out of service for at least 50 years because the pines around it are quite large. I’m not sure however that it was a par 4 from there because it was still about 215 to the middle of the green.

But I don’t think that it’s much of a loss because current 225 yard version must be one of the world’s great par 3. It plays at least one club downhill (~40-50 feet). I actually didn’t think that the pond was the major issue here—it’s an issue, but there are 20 yards between the pond and the front of the green. The bigger issue is that the green is very narrow but deep and the further offline you miss your shot, the tougher the pitch is. The shot from the right bunkers—to a narrow green steeply pitched from right to left—is very difficult.

But there’s also plenty of room to play short and right of the green if you’re not confident about the carry. I’d lose the pine tree to the right of the pond because shots this far right will be penalized with a very awkward angle for the second. One of the most complex and original par 3s that I’ve ever seen, but also playable for everyone.

I absolutely loved the long par 4 seventh. It’s a classic English drive--i.e. straight uphill. There’s more room right than left and it’s very easy to let your drive drift right. You really don’t want to do this; the hole doglegs and if you miss the fairway too far right, the ground slopes off into the woods. You have to thread your drive between two bunkers 40 yards short of the green and for the sake of public health, you’ll want to be accurate—the green is right at the course’s major crossing point and an inaccurate shot could take someone out on the eighth tee, seventeenth tee, or sixteenth green.

Eight is a very tough 185 yard par 3 to an elevated green with deep front left and right bunkers. The short par 4 ninth is the course’s least interesting hole, but a greedy drive up the left can get caught by the heather.

The 400 yard tenth is about an 80 degree dogleg left. I usually don’t like such sharp doglegs, but this hole is great. The bunkers on the inside corner of the dogleg are both beautiful and interesting. It’s only about 210 to carry all of them, but you have to hug the tree line to do this. And even on this line, a long hitter will have to hit a draw because the fairway runs out at about 270. So this is a great hole to try out your big sweeping draw; if you screw up and leave it right you’ll be ok, you’ll just have a 200 yard second.

Standing on the tee on the long par 4 eleventh with heather left and bunkers just where you’d want to land your drive on the right, something finally sinks in—this course is a damn good (and hard) test of driving. It’s about 235 to carry the first bunker on the right, but you can also work the ball around it from the left using the slope if you like to hit a fade. The approach is very demanding—to an elevated green with a valley short.

Twelve is just the kind of long par 3 that I like: one that gives you ample room and gentle slope to run the ball onto the green. Aim at the left side of the green (just inside the walking path) and let the slope carry your ball to the right onto the green.

Thirteen is another medium length par 4 with a great, but different driving concept. While most bunkers have been on the short line to the green, this one is on the outside, to the left. But the fairway slopes left to right and unless you hug the heather up the right side, the slope of the fairway can drag your ball into the bunker.

The approach is absolutely gorgeous—I’ve never been to Australia, but the bunkers here look like pictures that I’ve seen of the Melbourne sand belt courses. The green is also something of a half-pipe that angles from front left to back right. The best angle of approach is from near the fairway bunker on the left but the left side of the green is quite high and you can use this slope to feed your ball to right pin placements.

Fourteen is almost 460 on the card but was playing quite short on this day because it’s slightly downhill and the fairways were (obviously) quite firm. It’s really important to hit a long drive here because again, the green is narrow and deep. It’s also very important to be up the left side because there’s a bunker right of the green and everything left of the green slopes down into a pond. A very demanding but excellent long par 4.

Fifteen is a lovely little pond par 3, which provides a nice break after a string of very tough holes.

The tough par 4s pick up again with the sixteenth, which isn’t very long (~370), but requires another uphill drive where the only thing that you can see is heather (the group in front of me kept seeing heather after the drive…). It’s one of the most awkward driving holes that I’ve seen, although the fairway is actually about 50 yards wide (wish I had looked at Google Earth when I was standing on the tee). You also only want to go about 225 yards.

​The approach is quite photogenic, over a valley and two big mounds of heather, but many of the divots (and there were many) in the heather looked downright tragic. Smokers might be tempted to ‘accidentally’ drop their cigarette/cigar in here…which on this day would have generated a fire that would have taken out the course and a few surrounding towns. It’s a great hole, but it would kill some of the high handicap golfers that I usually play with.

Seventeen is another elegant and strategically interesting long par 4. The drive is similar to eleven with the bunkers right, but there’s less tilt in the fairway here and it’s easier to run into the heather on the left (as I learned). It’s important to hit a good drive here because there’s a phalanx of angled bunkers protecting the entire approach on the right side starting about 50 yards short of the green.

And the course doesn’t let up at the finish—eighteen is another long par 4 (440 yards) with staggered bunkers from 210-275. The green has has a bunker just short on the left and another flanking on the both the left and right.

West Sussex puts one thing to rest definitely: that a 6,350 yard course always plays short. I knew this having already played the Addington and Swinley Forest. But West Sussex felt even longer than both of those. There are five par 4s over 430 yards and the ones around 400 yards like two, ten, and thirteen also play quite long. Even some of the shorter par 4s like sixteen play long because the drives are intimidating and the smart play is to lay well back. Two of the five par 3s require will require a hybrid or wood. And the one par 5 comes on the first hole. Except for nine and maybe the par 3 fifteenth, it’s all hard holes from the second tee on.

So yes, a course that’s short on the card can play quite long and difficult. But difficulty aside, this is a just a great golf course. It really helps to be able to shape your ball off the tee, especially when the fairways are running firm. And the greens can accept a variety of shots, depending on your skill level and preference. Really it’s a shame that the greens aren’t a bit more interesting because while I suspect that this course already belongs on a world top 100 list, I also suspect that it could be top 25 or 30 and the best course in England if it had a really good set. Tee-to-green, it’s as good a course as I’ve seen.

Walton Heath’s Old Course seemed to always be up with Sunningdale’s Old Course in the rankings as the top heathland course. They were often the only two heathland courses on Golf Magazine’s World Top 100. I suspect that a large part of this had to do with the fact that the Old Course—or at least a composite course that consisted mostly of holes from the Old—had hosted many big tournaments, including the 1981 Ryder Cup.

But attitudes seemed to have changed with time. Swinley Forest, St. George’s Hill, and Sunningdale New are now more in favor with the rankings. Maybe that has to do with renewed appreciation for the big Golden Age architects like Harry Colt. If that’s the case, the Old—really both courses at Walton Heath—and Herbert Fowler’s work in general deserve a closer look.

Without making a judgment of the relative merits of Walton Heath to Colt’s S courses, there’s a lot of character in the work that Fowler did at Walton Heath. The land is fairly tame so he generated earthworks—odd mounds and trenches—that create a lot of challenge and interest. I especially appreciate them because they are an efficient way of generating interest. You just need one heather-covered mound or one 10-yard trench somewhere off the tee to make a hole interesting. Same at the greens; almost all the greens sit on the lay-of-the-land but there’s tremendous variety in the size, pitch, and interior contour. Then like in the fairways trenches (some sand-filled, some not) and the occasional mound create interest around the edges. Almost all of the shaping on Walton Heath appears to be contained to small (a few hundred square feet) areas. This contrasts with Colt’s nearby work, where there was a lot of earthmoving to construct greens and bunker complexes.

And in line with recent trends, Walton Heath is also a model of tree management and turf—even among heathland courses, which are mostly excellent on both of these. So whether the Old Course belongs in the World Top 100 or not—I don’t know; I haven’t played enough of them to make that call—it and its sister the New Course deserve closer attention because they generate a lot of interest in a efficient way. And the green contours on both are excellent—something that is not true of even most of the best heathland courses.


The Old Course starts in a similar way to several other London-area courses including the Addington, Liphook, and Knole Park—on a par 3. And I think in all four cases (not 100% sure about Knole Park), the courses weren’t intended to start on a par 3. The Addington and Liphook originally started on other holes. I believe that the Old’s first has always been its first hole, but it used to be a par 4, with its tee behind the entrance drive some 80 yards back. I think that it’d be a better start that way because the current 235 yard par 3 is a nasty way to start. It would also have been a good short par 4 from a strategic perspective because the main hazard is at the front right of the green and there’s a bunker just left of the left guarding the optimal landing area.

After the first, we have the typical British 60 mph. two-lane highway road crossing. A lot of people knock golf for being ‘not a sport,’ but it feels pretty sporting to me to have to run for your life to avoid ending up as road kill. If a game involves cheating death, it’s a sport…although I guess that raises the question of whether drunk cart driving on some of northern Michigan’s mountainous courses is a sport…

Anyway the second hole on the Old is the first hole for tournaments and it’s an outstanding long par 4. The drive is semi-blind over a ridge. The first tree on the right provides an important visual cue—a good drive on that line or right of it will be in junk.

The uphill approach is beautiful and plays to one of the best greens on the property. It’s large and Fowler appears to have done zero shaping to construct it. There are some mounds left of the green but they’ve become obscured by trees.

I really liked the short par 4 third. The strategy is simple—if you’re near the left fairway bunker about 230 out from the back tees, you’ll have a good angle into the narrow but deep green. But as we saw on the New Course, this isn’t all apparent from the tee because there are two trench bunkers at the start of the fairway that obscure the visuals.

To me, the long par 4 fourth is exemplary of Fowler’s shaping. There’s a partially sand-filled trench up the right but the main feature for most is a sand filled pit right in the middle of the fairway about 250 yards from the medal tees. Unlike the junk that bisects several fairways on the New, it’s possible to go around this bunker, but you have to be a champion accurate driver.

​The approach to the green is an absolute delight. Maybe my favorite feature on the whole course is this random mound in the middle of the fairway about 70 yards short of the green (maybe this is where they put the dirt from the driving zone pit). If you can carry this, the green is wide open but there are sand and non-sand-filled trenches on both sides for the inaccurate.

The par 4 fifth is just under 400 yards from the medal tees, which are right next to the fourth green. From here, it’s only about 210 to get past the bunker on the right and the drive runs downhill—that’s probably why they built championship tees 100 yards further back. The approach is downhill to another green that’s open in front. And that’s when things become noteworthy: this is one of the best greens that I’ve seen not only in England, but anywhere. It’s deep and slopes back-to-front but the greatness is in the little bumps and ridges across its surface. I don’t know why more architects haven’t been able to create greens with this combination of interest and lack of severity. I could spend half a day just studying this green.

With the long par 4 sixth the difficulty increases and we lose some character for a few holes. The holes around the turn are not Fowler originals; they were altered to make room for the M-25. This sixth probably has the narrowest fairway this side of Winged Foot—I tried to lay-up and still hit it in the left fairway bunkers. The green is very tough to hit; it’s elevated over a pot bunker and a grass pit and the entrance is narrow.

I really liked the not-Fowler par 3 seventh. While the grass hollows short of the green aren’t great replicas of Fowler’s, they still generate interest. I also liked the convex edges around the green.

The par 5 eighth just beats the ninth on the New for a dubious distinction: loudest hole that I’ve ever played, thanks to the M-25 50 yards through the trees behind the green. There isn’t a lot of interest from tee to green but the green is small, dome-shaped, and a tough target.

The ninth is a decent medium-length par 4. It’s helpful to look at your pin sheet on the tee (they give you one with exact hole locations) because there are bunkers at the front left and right and you want to play to the opposite side of the fairway to leave the best angle.

Although we have a bit of a walk back to reach the tee, the par 4 tenth is a very good hole. There’s a bunker on the left about 220 yards out that you’ll want to skirt to open the angle to the green. This isn’t the most important thing in the world as the green is mostly open in front, but it can help if the pin is back right.

There’s nothing tricky about the ~200 yard par 3 eleventh—you just have to hit a good mid/long iron. Don’t go at the pin if it’s on the left like it was on this day…and certainly don’t go left of the green like I did (actually it wasn’t too hard a shot from over there).

Twelve is a short par 4 that gets some accolades, but I didn’t find it to be anything special. There’s a bunker on the right about 215 yards out and you just want to go somewhere left of it. You want to be near it because the green angles from front-right to back-left and the further you go, the tougher the angle becomes. There’s also a dirt road that bisects the fairway just right of this bunker (the hole doglegs right). A long hitter could carry the road and go for the green, but there’s so much junk up there that I don’t think that this would make much sense. Better to hit a 220 yard lay-up and wedge on. Thinking back on it (with some help from Google Earth), it seems to be a pretty good hole and if I played it once or twice more, I might agree with others about its merit.

After an only occasionally interesting middle stretch, I think that the last six holes constitute one of the strongest stretches in the London area. The drive on the par 5 thirteenth (one of three in this stretch) is very challenging; the bunkers on the right start at about 215 from the medal tees and the further you go, the more that they narrow the fairway.

I hit a perfect drive just past the bunkers but the approach is also disconcerting. That’s because the green is just left of the right side tree line; unless you’re laying up, you don’t want to go left or over the next fairway bunker. The green is fronted by two proper pot bunkers, which you don’t see on other heathland courses but look appropriate on the open plain of Walton Heath.

If I had to pick a hole that exemplifies heathland golf, it might be the par 4 fourteenth. This hole sits in the middle of the property and you can see almost all of both courses from here. The placement of the fairway hazards is exceptional. From the 510 yard medal tees, the bunker on the right is about 240. If you shy away from that and play up the left side, there’s a hidden Fowler grass trench about 280 out. It’s better to approach the green from the left side because it’s deep and angles from front left to back right. After #5, this might be the most undulating green on the course.

Fifteen is very tough—narrow, with bunkers and heathery mounds all up the right side. The approach is over a large sand-filled trench 50 yards short of the green to a very large green. It slopes away to the back and I found it quite difficult to putt.

According to the yardage guide, the par 5 sixteenth was a favorite of golf writer Bernard Darwin. The landing zone is wide and if you can a gentle draw, the slope will carry your ball well down the fairway—I almost reached the right fairway bunker, which was something like 340 from the tee that I was playing…and I only drink the occasional protein shake.

Darwin was especially complementary of the approach. He described the green as “perched defiantly on something of a crest with a most cavernous bunker eating into its right-hand side.” I thought that like most of the greens at Walton Heath, the green rested very comfortably on the land. But I looked back at some of my pictures of the right side and back of this green from when I played the second hole on the New Course earlier in the day and I realized that the entire right side is built up. In any case, I agree with Darwin’s assessment of the front right bunker.

A bunch of holes cross each other this point and you could take advantage of the confusion to play the second on the New Course and get a freebee seventeen holes (just say that you’re bad at counting and didn’t notice that the flags on the two courses were a different color). The par 3 seventeenth on the Old has deep bunkers at its front left and right. The green is larger than it appears.

The Old finishes on another solid par 4. Bunkers narrow the fairway at 225 so you either need to lay up or hit an accurate drive. The approach to the deep but narrow features one final carry over a sandy trench 20 yards short of the green. Err short because there are bunkers left and right at the midpoint of the green.

So ended one of my best 36 hole days of golf. I’m glad that we’ve gotten a few more great 36 hole options in my home state of Michigan with the addition of second 18s at Forest Dunes and Arcadia Bluffs. But while they aren’t really alternatives (unless you’ve got deep pockets or a lot of frequent flyer miles), I think that I’d take 36 at Walton Heath over either of those (incidentally, the look of the Loop reminds me of Walton Heath). There’s a charm to the architecture here that few courses have. Both courses are playable for high handicappers but plenty challenging for low handicappers—if you don’t mind many 100 yard walk backs to the championship tees.

As we’ve seen throughout these photographs, the land at Walton Heath is fairly tame. There can’t be more than 10 or 15 feet of elevation change on any hole. And the slopes are gradual; there aren’t any small scale undulations like you’d find on a links course. Much of both courses is flat. That makes both courses even more impressive. Without really building greens at all, Fowler used the pitch of the land plus a variety of mounds and trenches to create substantial strategic and aesthetic interest. I’ve played at least a few dozen courses on land that was better than this. Almost none of them were as good. If you don’t believe that you can build a great course on flattish land, you should see Walton Heath and contemplate why it works so well.

Along with Sunningdale and Winged Foot, Walton Heath is a standard on lists of clubs with 36 great holes. As with those clubs, there’s a pretty strong consensus at Walton Heath as to which is the better course. In this case, it’s the Old Course.

But unlike Sunningdale and Winged Foot, the second course here, the New Course, flies a bit under the radar. People seem to acknowledge that the club has 36 great holes but then never really discuss the New Course. It does well on lists of UK/England top courses, but doesn’t get much support as being in the top tier of heathland courses. I don’t understand this. I agree with the member that I played with: there isn’t a big difference in quality between the Old and New Courses. Both are among the best heathland courses.

And given the basic facts of the two courses, we shouldn’t expect there to be much difference between them. Not only are they on the same gently rolling, open heathland, the routings weave in and out of each other. Both were designed by Herbert Fowler (the Old opened in 1904 and the two nines of the New in 1907 and 1913) and incorporate the same features: large, undulating greens, deep bunkers, and odd, randomly placed heather covered mounds. They’re very stylish courses from an architectural standpoint and it’s easy to make a composite course here because this style is consistent across both courses. And despite the Old being the more highly rated course and the major contributor to the composite course that’s used for tournaments, I found the New slightly tougher because the holes seemed a bit narrower. The Old may be longer but at 7,200 yards from the tips, I think that the New is the second longest heathland course that I played.

On top of that, the Old Course isn’t all original because a few holes were lost to the construction of the M-25. That’s not to say that I think that the New is a better course than the Old, just that I think that it’s a much closer call than any of the rankings have it. But it is fair to say that the New is an excellent course and an under-appreciated one. I’d have it in the top tier of the London-area heathland courses.


Like the Old, the New starts on an odd hole—this time a very short par 4. Really, it’s like a dogleg par 3. I hit a 2-hybrid almost pin high…although I was getting some assistance from the firm summer fairways (it’s about 280 yards). You should play well out to the right here because while the green is large, it angles pretty sharply behind two bunkers at the front left and falls away to the back.

The second is a short, downhill par 3 to a deep green that slopes pretty hard from back to front.

The medium-long par 4 third has a feature that appears several times on the New Course but one that I don’t like: a fairway that’s cut off by bunkers. This was probably the worst case of it because the hole is 420 from the medal tees and the bunker cuts across the fairway 240 from the tee. I was stupid and didn’t look at the yardage book and just hit driver…and carried the bunker. Fortunately it’s easy to run the ball onto the green here, but there is a pretty significant false front.

Four is another sub-300 yard par 4 from the medal tees. Both Walton Heath courses are a very simple walk from the medal tees but several of the holes require 100-125 yard walk backs if you play the tips. There’s a bunker guarding the front right and a very interesting heather-covered depression and mounds at the front left. Miss on the opposite side of the hole as the pin.

The long par 4 fifth is one of the best holes on the property and is to me, along with its next-door neighbor Old 14, a type-species hole for open heathland. The fairway bunkers on the right, which are only about a 200 yard carry from the tips, obscure most of the fairway. You need to play over them because you can run out of fairway on the left. But don’t push it, or you might spend several minutes wandering around in the heather (like we did...looking for my ball).

The approach is over a big, beautiful centerline bunker almost 100 yards short of the green. Unless you’ve hit a poor drive, the bigger issue here is the green which is narrow, guarded left and right by bunkers, and one of the most undulating on the property.

Six is a tough mid-length par 3 over two pot bunkers (I think that Walton Heath was the only heathland course that I played with sod-face bunkers). The green runs off left and long.

Seven is a lovely but disconcerting drive. As on several other holes, the heather-filled trench on the right is only a short carry and obscures a pretty wide fairway. The approach is gently uphill over another trench bunker to a green framed by farmland.

Like the third, the fairway on the par 5 eighth is bisected by junk, but I wasn’t able to reach it off a good drive from the medal tees (it’s about 280 from there). The second is one of the more exacting lay ups on any par 5 that I’ve played. The landing area features staggered bunkers and heathery pits for the last ~100 yards. The green is reachable in two, but you must be accurate.

The long par 4 ninth has tees left and right of the eighth green. From the left, it’s a straight-away drive. From the right, it doglegs right around some oak trees. Again, the fairway is bisected, this time at ~270 from the medal tees and by a huge patch of heather. I didn’t get a picture of the approach to the green but I remember it being very appropriate for such a long par 4: wide open in front, with just a single bunker ~25 yards short who pull their approach.

N.B. Along with the eighth green on the Old Course, the ninth green on the New is my loudest experience on a golf course as the M-25 is about 100 yards through the trees on the right.

Ten is a nice par 3 with an interesting green but the most interesting thing about it is definitely the donut-shaped bunker at the front left. One of the best examples of Fowler’s intricate shaping at Walton Heath.

Eleven is a medium-length but very tough par 4 because it’s narrow and very thick heather comes up right to the edge of the fairway on both sides. The green is very large but unless you’re up the right side of the fairway, it’ll be almost completely obscured by a huge trench sand bunker that covers most of its left side.

Between junk bisecting the fairway and the short carry hazard that obscures most of an otherwise wide fairway, we encounter the latter on the long par 4 twelfth. It’s good that the fairway is wide open here because you need to rip one; the green is 50 yards deep but has a nasty bunker just in front. In addition to being one of the largest, this green is also one of the most undulating.

We drive over some more Fowler mounds to reach the fairway on the short par 5 thirteenth. If you catch a good one on a dry summer day, you could reach the bunker on the right that’s ~300 yards from the medal tees. Again, the green sits simply on the land and is protected by bunkers left and right that leave plenty of room to run the ball onto the green.

The two fourteenth holes are two of the best holes at Walton Heath although the New’s probably takes a few playings before you’ll be comfortable with the drive. While you might think that you want to aim somewhere near the fairway bunker on the right, that’s completely deceiving—you actually want to aim just inside the tree line on the left. The carry to the fairway on this line is only ~200 yards and if you go much further to the right, you can run through it. The hole turns to the right and the best angle is from the right side…although not as far right as you see in the second photo below.

No obscuring or bisecting hazard on fifteen, but the fairway is narrow and there is thick heather up both sides—yet again, this one required the whole search party of five of us (don’t tell the club secretary…) to find one ball in it (not mine this time). Another large green that sits gently on the land.

Sixteen is a very long, straight par 5 and while the fairway is bisected by heather, it’s over 300 yards out. The second appears to be the standard open-in-the-middle, trouble-at-the-sides approach common to the long holes here but there’s a difference: a rough filled pit right in the middle of the approach just short of the green. It isn’t such a difficult shot if you hit it in there, but it will thwart most attempts to run the ball onto the green.

My member playing partner said that he thought that the short par 4 seventeenth was one of the best holes on the course. I completely agree. It’s one of the widest fairways on the course but there’s real cunning underfoot here—if you place your drive up the right side, you have a very awkward angle into a green that angles from front left to back right but tilts right-to-left. And the right side of the green is blocked by a heather-covered trench. While you can get at pines in the middle or back of the green from the right side of the fairway, it’s always an easier approach here to be up the left.

The eighteenth is a medium-short par 4 that can play very short if you hug the tree line on the left. But it’s probably not worth the risk because the hole it doesn’t really affect the angle into this large, deep green.

Walton Heath is a bit different from most of the other heathland courses because it's on a relatively flat and treeless plain and they’re mostly hilly and play through pine forests. The abundance of sunshine hitting the ground here means that the heather is very thick, up there with Sunningdale’s New Course and maybe Hankley Common for thickest heather.

But the real standout feature on the New, as on the Old, is Fowler’s shaping. The variety of shaping of mounds and trenches, both with and without shaping, is some of the most elegant work that I saw on any course in England. Fowler’s shaping less extensive than Colt’s and exhibits greater randomness both in placement and style. While Colt used mounds to frame many greens in an almost modern style and used diagonal crossing bunkers on the approach to greens of longer holes, there’s less of a pattern to Fowler’s shaping. Sometimes he uses a trench to obscure part of a fairway or a green. Sometimes there’s sand in it. Sometimes the bunker has a heather-covered mound in the middle of it. Sometimes that heather-covered mound is in the middle of the fairway in the driving zone (we’ll see that on the Old).

One of the things that I loved most about English golf courses was the perfect lack of perfection on many of them. The blind shots, the odd shaping. While the flat land of Walton Heath helps keep blindness to a minimum, I can’t think of a course that had more character in its shaping than the two here. This also extends to the greens, which had some of the greatest variety in size and undulation of any of the heathland courses—more like some of the links courses that I played. What the course lacks in terrain it more than makes up for in design character and I’d like to think that that’s the main reason why the Old Course still ranks highly. The New Course is no different and should benefit just the same.

Sunngindale’s Old Course has long been the consensus pick for the best of the heathland courses. While others, like it’s younger brother the New Course, Swinley Forest, and St. George’s Hill have crept up on it in the rankings, the Old still usually comes out on top. It has been a mainstay in the world top 50 since well before I started looking at these lists in the late 90s.

While I haven’t played enough of the world top 100 to comment on the Old Course’s placement, I’d agree with the consensus that this is the best of at least the London area heathland courses. Why? Variety. I don’t believe that I’ve ever played a course with such a delightful mix of holes. There are really short holes, there are really long holes. There are long vistas, there are funky uphill blind shots. There are big undulating greens and there are small flat ones.

And for the golf course architecture buffs, there are the older Willie Park Jr. holes and the newer Harry Colt ones. The major difference between these is in the green sites and the shaping around them. Park Jr.’s green tend to be on flat or gently sloping land with open approaches while Colt built several of his greens into hillsides with diagonal bunkers on the approach. I usually like consistency in shaping style across the course but the blend of these two style just works on the Old Course. Maybe it’s because Colt’s style works better on hillsides and Park Jr.’s works better on flat land and were always going to have to be a few of each type of hole on this sprawling piece of forested heathland.

But I don’t want to spend too much time getting into who did what on the Old Course because I’d rather talk about the individual holes. This course has more good holes than almost any course that I can think of. Several are quite quirky. It may not be much of a test of golf for the best players in the world anymore but for the rest of us, I can hardly imagine a more enjoyable one on which to play golf.


The drizzle stopped after my morning round on the New but it kept everyone off the course, which I had pretty much all to myself. One of the quaint (but expensive) homes to the right of the fairway was burning wood and the set the tone perfectly for this course on this cold, grey day. The first hole is a short and wide-open par 5. It introduces us to some of the English quirk that we’ll find throughout this course in this case, a series of diagonal, heather-covered ridges running into the edges of the fairway starting about 150 yards short of the green. On Google Earth, it looks like these formed a hedge line along the edge of an old property but apparently there’s some archaeological significance here—they dug up some ancient pottery which is in a museum in nearby Reading.

The green is simple and slopes with the lay of the land from front right to back left, typical of the older Park Jr. greens throughout the course.

The second hole is an outstanding, but very difficult long par 4. The hole bends gently to the left and the drive is on a diagonal over another heather-covered ridge and a creek. This hole’s charming English quirk is a neighborhood road that crosses the fairway about 250 yards from the tee.

But not all quirks are charming. The second is semi-blind over a ridge to a small green that slopes away and is fronted by a deep bunker. There’s some room (but not a lot) on the right to run the ball onto the green but if you push is just a little, you’re in the heather. I’d think of the first two holes as one hole with two putting greens and a par of 9. You’re probably more likely to make 4 on the par 5 first and 5 on the par 4 second than vice versa.

The third is the first of what is by far the best set of drivable par 4s that I’ve seen on any course. I suspect that this is a Colt hole because of all of the bunkering and mounding around the green. This is really a textbook drivable par 4; while the carry over the bunkers on the right is only about 190 yards, you want to keep your ball up the lower left side because the green is narrow and two-tiered from high left to low right. An approach from the left side will leave an awkward pitch into a narrower aspect of the green which slopes away from you. So the right side of the fairway is optimal, but the bunkers continue all the way to the green.

My drive (near the bunker on the right) was actually too good on this day because they stuck the pin in the back-right corner. Oops.

The fourth features all of the standard elements of a Colt par 3. Uphill? Check. Green built into the side of a hill with bunkers on the low side? Check. Deeper than wide? Check. Actually this green is pretty big and the narrowness isn’t an issue. But the slope is—it tilts pretty good from back to front.

The drive on the par 4 fifth is one of the iconic vistas in heathland golf although I’m not really sure why. It’s an attractive hole, but I never thought of it as an aesthetic standout when I saw those pictures—especially compared to some of the others that you can take on both this and nearby courses.

​But it is a very good and tough hole. The bunkers on the right start at about 235 yards and narrow the fairway considerably if you go past 250. The approach to the green has two quirks: (1) a pond 40 yards short of the green with a bizarre wood plank running down its length and (2) a random heather-covered mound about 20 yards short and left of the green. Neither of these should be a factor for good players who hit good drives but they would cause all kinds of problems for higher handicap golfers.

The sixth hole isn’t one of the course’s better holes although the heather covered ridges that separate the driving zone from the green and the steeply left-to-right pitched green are interesting.

Just behind the sixth green is the tee for the par 4 seventh, where the Old Course goes from being very good to being magical. The drive is a real ‘what the hell?’ moment; the first 115 yards are straight uphill over a bunker. No architect would place the tee here today—they’d have us walk the 100 yards up the hill and just start the hole from there.

But then they’d be depriving us of one of the biggest surprises and one of my favorite moments on any course that I’ve played: the moment when you crest the hill and it’s like you’re stepping into a grand cathedral of golf. The green is definitely a Colt—built into a steep right-to-left with bunkers and a drop-off to its left. Apparently the original Park Jr. green was somewhere in the hollow to the left in what’s now (some 100 years) later, a mature forest.

To climb this hill, Colt does a switchback in his routing with another Coltian par 3. Although I didn’t think that this hole was particularly special, the setting is just charming.

The ninth is the second of the Old’s great drivable par 4s. While this hole gets less attention than the third and the eleventh, I found it brilliant. It’s only about 260 yards from the tips to the front of the green, but bunkers cut diagonally across the fairway from the left starting at 215 yards. The green angles from front-left to back-right and the back-right corner sits up on a higher tier (out of play.

While the flag was on the easier left side of the green on this day, the further right that they put the flag, the more important that you approach from the left side. If the flag were all the way back right and you missed, say in the right fairway bunker about 30 yards short of the green, you’d have 40 yard fairway bunker shot over another bunker to maybe a 30 foot deep area that slopes into the woods if you miss long. While you can recover from most places if the pin is on the left, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen a pin where the angle of approach is as important as a back-right pin here.

In their 1994 Shell’s Wonderful World’ of Golf match with a back-right pin, Nick Faldo drove it in the short right bunker then put his next one over the green. Greg Norman drove it in the left green side bunker. Both made 4 on this 275 yard hole.

The other oft-photographed hole on the Old Course is the long par 4 tenth. This is a justifiably revered hole; bunkers pinch the fairway at about 260 starting on the right and there are two up the left for those who don’t properly shape their ball into this left-to-right sloping fairway. While it wasn’t too hard to hit the fairway on this late-winter day (I still failed), I think that it’d be very difficult when the course plays firm in the summer.

The second is uphill to the largest and most heavily contoured green on the course. I wish I had gotten a picture of it.

The eleventh is the third drivable par 4 and is definitely the strangest of the bunch. It features another short, uphill drive over a bunker to a blind fairway on the other side. I’m not sure that I’d recommend trying to drive this green even if you’ve got the length because the line with the green is protected by several stocky pine trees. I’m a bit torn about these trees because if you pushed your drive, you’d already be penalized by the heather over there. My preference would be to leave one or two of them and remove the rest so that there was still some aerial hazard without completely blocking the path or chance of recovery.

If you lay up, it’s important to keep your ball in the right center of the fairway because the green is very small. Especially if the flag were on the left side of the green, it’d be very difficult to play to it from the left side of the fairway.

The long par 4 twelfth is clearly another Colt hole because it features his signature shelf green and diagonal approaching bunkers. It’s important to keep your drive near the bunkers up the left side because the approach shot can get quite long and the angle very awkward from the right side. The green is protected by a mound in the front-right and the drop-off on the right is quite steep. Apparently Park Jr.’s twelfth green was on the flatter ground to the right of this green. Yet another great hole.

After a fairly uninteresting drop shot par 3, we come to a short par 5 that I just love. It’s a pretty tough driving hole as the fairway narrows at the bunker, which is just 240 from the tips. The second is blind over a diagonal string of bunkers that angle from short-right to long-left, between 90 and 175 yards short of the green. While they shouldn’t be an issue off a decent drive, they make the second very interesting for shorter hitters.

For longer hitters, the bigger issue is the bunkers left and right on the approach to the green. You have to be precise if you’re going for the green or you’re likely to have a 40 yard bunker shot for your third. The green is one of my favorite on the course as is exemplary of the Park Jr. greens, resting simply on the flat land. A wonderfully simple green site after several challenging ones.

The very long par 3 fifteenth offers three choices of teeing grounds. From the left markers, it’s about 215 to the front but the green is open. Then there are a set of markers just behind the fourteenth green which play a little shorter, but require you to skirt the front right green side bunker. The toughest are the set on the right that play about 220 to the front and require you to hit a fade or carry the front right green side bunker. The green is simple and flat and the sharp edges on the bunkers made this green complex look like something out of the Melbourne sand belt. Very good long par 3.

We close with three medium-long par 4s. The sixteenth seems to be channeling Trent Jones’ soon-to-be-former redesign of Oakland Hills, with clusters of fairway bunkers left and right. More interesting is the ring of fairway bunkers that surround the last 60 yards of the uphill approach to the green. The green appears to be another Park Jr.: largest and laying simply on a gradual upslope.

While I’ve talked a lot about the Old’s great drivable par 4s, there are even more outstanding long par 4s and the seventeenth might be my favorite of the bunch. The best drive here will skirt or carry the right fairway bunkers (it’s about 240 over the most distant one). If you hedge left or pull your drive, you can easily put it into the clump of pine trees left of the fairway.

The approach is a beauty to an open green over a large bunker about 40 yards short and is framed by the eighteenth hole and the clubhouse. I’d imagine that when the course is playing firm, many will have to just carry the bunker so that their ball doesn’t run through the green.

You drive uphill and (hopefully) between two well-placed bunkers on eighteen. The approach is over another diagonal string of fairway bunkers to a green that angles from front-left to back-right and is protected by several bunkers to the sides and a mighty oak tree in the back.

When people ask me what my favorite course in England was, I always say Sunningdale's Old Course. I just loved it. I’ve never played a course with such variety. One thing that I missed on some of the top shelf London heathland courses that others around the country had in spades is quirk. While they’re none the worse for it, Colt’s courses always have a polished, modern feel. But probably in large part because of its mixed origins, the Old Course possesses enough quirk to compare favorably to some of my favorite James Braid courses. To me, that sets it apart from Swinley Forest or St. George’s Hill, which have most of the brilliance of the Old, but little of its strangeness.

I don’t think that the Old Course would pose much of a challenge to the top players today. While it’s only par 70, it’s also only about 6,650 yards from the tips. But who cares? At least 80% of the golfers who play almost any course won’t be single digit handicaps. And with a few very hard holes like 2, 10, and 15, the Old can stand up just fine to most of them too. It’s actually a perfect mix of holes to test the game of a shorter-hitting single digit handicap…like me (I wasn't up to the challenge on this day).

But regardless of your skill level, every golfer who is going to be in London should drop a few hundred pounds and play this course. Actually they should drop a few hundred more and play both the Old and the New on the same day. I can hardly imagine a better 36 hole day of golf.

While I arrived in London in September 2015, I didn’t start playing golf until February 2016 when I decided to take a short trip to the southeast coast to play a few dream courses, Royal St. George’s and Royal Cinque Ports. I enjoyed the experience so much that when I got back to London, I immediately started plotting which of the many great London heathland courses to play first. While almost all of these clubs are private, with a few exceptions, ‘private’ in the UK means the same as ‘semi-private’ in the US—a club that has members but is opened for limited public play.

So I went first for the what are supposed to be the best of the bunch: the two courses at Sunningdale Golf Club. Both courses consistently make a variety of world top 100 lists and the Old Course seems to be the pick of many as the best heathland course. I established a habit early on of playing at least 36 holes a day and while the days aren’t at their longest in early March, the courses were empty enough and golfers in the UK play fast enough (and readily let you play through if you’re faster) to get in 18 holes on the New before lunch and then turn around and easily get in 18 on the Old after lunch.

What’s a heathland course? This term seems to be getting thrown around a lot without being given a very clear definition. The term ‘heath’ come from the heath family of plants Ericaceae, which includes rhododendrons, mountain laurels, and heather. The common characteristic of this family is that most of the members are acid-loving and their presence is an indicator of acidic and often low-nutrient soil. ’Heathland’ is the acidic dry land in northern Europe where two species of heather, common heather (Calluna vulgaris) and bell heather (Erica cinerea) are common. Most crops grow poorly in these soils. But they usually make good land for golf as the soils are often light and sandy—good conditions for growing rye grass and fescue. So then a heathland course is a course on heathland, which the presence of heather and a few other plants (holly, chestnut, Scots pine) indicate. We don’t have heather in the US, but the soils at places like Sand Valley and Forest Dunes are similar and some of the indigenous plants on those courses are reasonably close analogues to heather—especially the unrelated beach heather at Sand Valley.

There’s been a lot of debate about which of the two courses at Sunningdale is superior and while the standard answer was always the Old, there seems to be more questioning this lately. While the Old Course was the work of Willie Park Jr. with significant renovations by Harry Colt, the New Course is Colt with revisions by Tom Simpson. I won’t go into the history of the course, which has been pored over on sites like Golf Club Atlas.

But after playing the New Course, you can tell which parts of the Old Course are Colt and which are Park Jr. Colt liked to site his greens into hillside and there’s a lot of almost modern shaping around them. I’ll get into this a bit more when I discuss the Old Course, but while I usually value architectural consistency, I preferred the mix of Colt’s complex green sites/shaping and Park Jr.’s more minimalist approach on the Old. And while I usually like blind shots and both courses have several of them, I found the New’s repeated blind drives to narrow fairways surrounded by heather (there are three in a row on the front nine) a bit excessive. Both are great golf courses, but in line with the old consensus, I prefer the Old.


The long par 4 first is a good, but tough hole. There’s ample room to drive the ball, but the best approach is from the high left side of the fairway. While it wasn’t difficult to stick a drive up this on this soft late winter day, you’d want to be careful about trying to place a drive up there in the summer because the further that you go, the more that the woods encroach on the left. In what’ll become a theme, the green is narrow, but deep and is a tough target for such a long par 4.

The par 3 second was my first introduction to what we might call a signature hole type for both Colt and English golf generally: the uphill par 3. This green is the first of several where we see Colt’s distinctive, almost modern shaping, with the green built up on a pad and framed by mounds. I prefer Colt’s occasional mounding to the more symmetric (and artificial looking) mounding of 80s and 90s architects, but Colt’s shaping around his green complexes definitely looks like an early predecessor to me.

The medium-length par 4 third is our first serious introduction to heather. It’ll catch your drive if you try to cut too much off the right side here and as I learned a few holes later, you don’t want to be hitting out of it—especially on such a cold and wet day. The approach to the green is a beauty, with three staggered bunkers. And while Colt’s green contours tend to be pretty mild (that was another theme across his courses), this one was subtle but quite good—although it’s hard to tell in this picture.

The long par 4 fourth commences a three-hole stretch to which I can’t think of a clear superior. It starts with a long, gently right-doglegging par 4. To be sure, they could really use some tree clearing on the right side, especially off the tee. But the uphill approach to the green is excellent, giving ample room to run the ball onto the green while still requiring care to avoid the encroaching heather on the left.

The short fifth is one of my favorite par 3s in England. The setting is lovely and the green is very challenging, with a spine running left to right across the middle creating a receptive front portion but requiring great control to any shot played to the back. Although they’re covered in heather, we can see in the third photo more of Colt’s mounding behind this green.

That brings us to the par 5 sixth, one of the most justly famous holes in England. The hole plays through a sea of heather and the views to the right over the open heath were stunning, even on this dreary day. There’s a strong argument to be made that the club should remove a lot of the trees on this and the other open heath holes although they are on commonly-owned land (the Chobham Common, a great place for hiking or walking your dog) and I’m not sure whether it has the right to do so.

This was also where I got my first experience hitting out of heather. The best analogy that I can think of—if you know American landscaping plants—is trying to hit out of a creeping juniper. Heather, especially when wet as on this day, is very tough and ropey. I tried to hit a 9-iron about 120 yards to lay up on my second but my club got tied up in the heather and the result looked like a shank that went about 80 yards into a creek.

While my shot was naive and incompetent, the aforementioned creek is an important part of what makes this hole interesting as it cuts into the fairway about 125 yards short of the green and forms a diagonal hazard up the right side of the lay up area. There isn’t much need to challenge it if you’re laying up because the left side of the fairway is higher and flatter, but it’s a good hazard for those who go for this elevated, two-tiered green and don’t have the distance to carry it all the way.

The medium-length par 4 seventh begins a stretch of three holes of which I wasn’t such a fan. Each features a blind drive to a narrow fairway. The landing area on seven bends to the right and it’s easy to run through the fairway on the left (as I learned). The green is on a diagonal from front-left to back-right and is protected by a bunker on its right side. Although I really liked the shaping around the green, I wasn’t a huge fan of the fact that the optimal angle into is is from the heather left of the fairway (hey, at least I left myself the optimal angle on my drive…).

While the eighth is also blind and doglegs to the right, the fairway is a bit wider. The approach is uphill to another deep, narrow green built into the side of a hill, a Colt specialty (although this might be a Simpson green?).

The long par 4 ninth is another up-and-over blind drive and while this time the fairway runs straight, it’s also quite narrow between a heather-covered hill on the left and pines/heather on the right. It’d be nice if the club could remove some of the pines on the right side of the fairway on the approach to the green because the optimal angle to the green should be from the right side of the fairway and the trees partially block this line.

The weather was becoming pretty dismal by the time that I reached the tee on the long par 3 tenth. Fortunately there was a halfway house with a hot cup of coffee and a nice sausage roll behind the green. In Colt’s original routing of the New Course, the ninth hole finished well to the left of the current tenth tee and the tenth tee was on the hill to the left, playing down to this green. I bet that the hole would make more sense from up there because from these tees, it’s a very long (~220 yards) shot to the most well-bunkered green on the course with no room to run the ball onto the green.

Eleven is a bit disconcerting as the landing area is wide but you can’t see any of it. The fairway winds to the left and a good line for most good players is just to the inside of the trees—it’s about a 215 yard carry to the green on this line. Long hitters can just go over them and leave themselves a little wedge. I loved the simplicity of this green but not that while it just sits on the land (and slopes front-to-back with it), Colt still built a lot of little mounds around it.

Twelve is a good driving hole, with heather running diagonally up the left side. I don’t think that there’s much reason to challenge the left side though because the hole is fairly short and center-right leaves a better angle. The green is another Colt special, benched into a right-to-left sloping hill with heather covering the slope on the low side.

Thirteen is the course’s longest par 5, about 560 yards from the back tees. The drive is downhill to one of the more generous fairways on the course but the most interesting thing about this hole is the bunker in the center of the fairway about 115 yards short of the green. It’s one of the better-placed centerline bunkers that I’ve seen. The green complex is minimalist for this course and is best approached from the left side of the fairway.

I found the 190 yard par 3 fourteenth with mounds framing the back of the green to be a very modern-looking par 3.

The medium-long par 4 fifteenth is a very interesting hole, semi-blind off the tee to a fairway that runs diagonally from left to right with a pond in the corner of the dogleg on the left side. While a bit awkward, I found this to be an excellent driving hole and one of the better uses of water as a driving hazard that I’ve seen. There’s plenty of room to play left of it, but this makes the uphill approach to another narrow/deep green longer and more difficult. This is one green where the shaping around the green was a bit too modern-looking for my liking, although it blends in well with the surroundings from the fairway.

The last three holes on the New Course are pretty disappointing. They start with a medium-length par 4 that doglegs gently to the right. I do like the bunkering on the approach to the green and the diagonal pattern that starts well short of the green is something that we’ll see more on the Colt holes next door and especially at St. George’s Hill.

The par 3 seventeenth, with its built-up green and mounds at the back, reminded me of a nice course in Michigan. I didn't find the two par 3s on the back nine to be a strength of the New Course.

The eight is a short-but-tight par 5. In fact, the opening and closing holes of both the New and Old Courses are crammed into a corridor that was tight enough to require a fence of the left side of this tee (you can kind of see it in this picture) to prevent those on the eighteenth tee of the Old Course from getting whacked (definitely the only thing about Sunningdale that reminded me of a local muni). Although I didn’t much care for the hole, there’s no denying that the bunkering and shaping around the green are very well done.

The New Course is a very tough test of golf, especially off the tee. It might be the toughest driving course that I played during my time in the UK. There are a lot of blind tee shots, the heather is thicker here than most of the other heathland courses, and there are a lot of encroaching trees. Coupled with the narrow, well-defended greens, I found this to be one of the most difficult of the heathland courses. I wish that they’d lose some trees especially on the holes around the turn because (1) it would open up the dramatic heathland landscape and (2) would help distinguish New from the more wooded Old. I’m not sure about how much work they can do on common land. What the course really needs—although the residents in the surrounding multi-million £ homes wouldn’t like it—is a good fire to restore the open heath.

While it’s undeniable that the New has some great holes (esp. 4-6), I was left wondering a bit what everyone thinks is so special about it. Maybe I need a few more trips around in drier, more pleasant conditions. The New reminds me a bit of Crystal Downs in northern Michigan in that the front nine is excellent with several world class holes, but the back nine is a bit of a letdown. I liked 10, 12, 13, and especially 15 but with the exception of maybe the latter, none struck me as a great hole. And I don’t believe that I’m the first person to note that the finishing stretch is a bit of a disappointment.

But while I’m skeptical that this is a world top 100 course, I haven’t played enough of them to render any kind of judgment on that. I can decide the question ‘is this an excellent golf course?’ And my answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ Until they restore the Addington, it’d be one of my top 5 London heathland courses. I didn’t feel that it had as many great holes as Colt’s nearby Swinley Forest or St. George’s Hill, but the best holes here are as good as anything on those.

Even if it’s a bit much once or twice, I liked Colt’s shaping. Of all of the different architects’ courses that I played in the UK (Fowler, Braid, Park Jr., etc.), you can most see the future of shaping in Colt’s work. He wasn’t afraid to move dirt, building up and shaping the edges of his green complexes to blend them in with their surroundings. While 80s and 90s American architects got completely carried away with this, there’s sometimes reason to do a lot of shaping around greens. When you want to build greens into hillsides as Colt liked to do, you need to do a good amount of shaping to (1) make them playable and then (2) make them blend into their surroundings. While we’ll see, I think, even better examples of this next door and at St. George’s Hill, Colt’s style is on full display here and marries well with the stunning heathland landscape.

I moved to London in September 2015 and the first time that I left the city after that was in December of that year, when I flew out of Gatwick Airport. The train to Gatwick goes through East Croydon, which is a pretty dismal place to most Brits, but for me it was exciting because that’s where the Addington is. I’ve been intrigued by the Addington since I first read about it in Tom Doak’s Confidential Guide some 15 years earlier. He made it sound very quirky, very English eccentric…completely unlike any course with which I had experience playing golf in the US. The par is less than 70, there are blind shots, crossover holes, etc. Plus there were several holes, like the twelfth and the thirteenth, which looked unique and spectacular.

So the following spring when I started my quest to play all of the golf courses worth playing within a few hours’ train ride of London, the Addington was one of my first stops. What surprised me most about the Addington was actually how not-quirky it was. It’s a really strong test of golf. It was also my first realization that par less-than-70 doesn’t mean that the course is really any shorter or easier. The Addington is 6,300 yards and par 69 from the back tees but it plays as long and as challenging as any 6,800 yard course with which I’m familiar. Later, when I played Rye, Swinley Forest, and West Sussex, I learned that this wasn’t a fluke. These courses—all of which are under 6,500 yards—are plenty long and strong enough to challenge all but the longest hitters (Rye might be the most difficult course that I’ve played). These courses all have at least five par 3s and in each case, 2 or 3 that make you hit long clubs.

The Addington has six par 3s from the wedge-postage stamp 120 yard eleventh up to the mighty 240 yard thirteenth and everything in between. I think that there’s more variety in these par 3s than on any other course that I’ve played. It’s certainly on my short list of courses with the best set of par 3s. The par three par 5s and the par 4s have similar variety. The Addington’s first great strength is its almost flawless composition—I don’t think that I’ve played a course with such a perfect mix of hole lengths. If nothing else, at least this should appeal to American golfers, who see ‘it makes you use all the clubs in the bag’ as a major virtue of a golf course.

But there’s a downside—of every course that I played in the UK, the Addington was most in need of tree removal. Actually, it was probably the only course that needed serious tree removal—the heathland clubs have been pretty good about tree management. But some of the holes, especially the aforementioned twelfth and the great sixteenth needed it badly. Fortunately, the new team of Mikes Clayton, DeVries, and Frank Pont is on the job. Pont has done an excellent job with restoration work on some of the other London clubs, including Camberley Heath and Tandridge and although I didn’t see them before their restorations, I’m pretty sure that neither had anywhere near the potential of the Addington. By the time of my last visit in summer 2018, the Addington had cleared out trees between the claustrophobic eighth and the ninth and the results were impressive. If they give the rest of the course that kind of treatment, the Addington should challenge for a spot as one of London’s top 5 heathland courses.

Apart from its inherent potential, another reason to restore the Addington is that it’s one of the few remaining examples of the work of architect J.F. Abercromby. He ran the club in its early days and was apparently a bit of an autocrat. But hey, Germany, Japan, and China all experienced their economic miracles under autocracy. His other notable courses are Coombe Hill (which I haven’t played), Knole Park, and Worplesdon and while there’s certainly a debate to have about it now, I don’t think that there’s any question that properly restored, the Addington would be the best of the bunch. I love Knole Park and Worplesdon but they wouldn’t have anything to match the drama of a properly restored twelfth or sixteenth hole at the Addington.

​
The Addington starts with quirk rather than drama: a short, uphill par 3. This wasn’t originally the first hole because the clubhouse was supposed to be up the hill behind the green. While I don’t think it’s the best kind of starting hole, it’s a very good par 3, with a deep but narrow green.

The second hole is a long, tough par 5, doglegging to the right but with a fairway that slopes left. The Addington doesn’t have a ton of bunkers but those that it does have tend to be very well-placed. There’s one about 230 off the tee on the left to catch a pull or a straight drive that kicks left (and saves you from going in the woods) and another about 175 yards short of the green near the apex of the hill to mess with your second if you’ve hit a poor drive. The green is beautiful—it just sits there, sloping with the land off to the back left. The mowing lines around it could use some work, but that’s an easy fix.

We’re getting another lesson about English golf courses with the tough, uphill par 3 third: that English architects liked to use par 3s to climb hills. We’ll see this over and over again, especially as I start to review Colt’s London-area courses. While the exposed areas of the course were very firm (as you’ll see from the color of the fairways in some of my later pictures), this hole is surrounded by trees and was soft. That’s unfortunately because it’s really tough to carry the ball the 200 yards uphill onto this green and the hole could benefit from a firm approach. I’d imagine that a good number of these trees will be coming down in the restoration and the additional sun should help firm the ground up.

Four is the first of many tough, long par 4s on the Addington. This is probably the one hole where the trees are a net benefit. You want to aim at the end of the tree line near the green on the left side here. If you’re on the right side, you’ll have to shape your ball around the trees that encroach from the right. I hope that Clayton et al keep enough trees here to retain this ‘goal post effect’ on the approach because otherwise it’s just a straight-away par 4. Still, you could save two clumps of trees nearest the green and lose the rest.

The fifth is another strong par 4 that doglegs gently right-to-left back around the fourth. The bunker short-right is perfectly placed to mess with your second off a poor drive but like several other bunkers on the course, could use a bit of aesthetic enhancement.

The sixth is a short dogleg left which has one notable feature of which I didn’t get a picture: the pit  bunker short-right of the green. You really shouldn’t be in here but if you hit a poor drive to the right and a weak approach, that’s where you might end up.

The short (~145 yard) par 3 seventh is a beauty, especially when the course is baked out and the heather is in bloom as in this photograph. The green sits in a manmade bowl…a bit of a forerunner to the 80s/90s American mound-surrounded courses (we’ll see more of this on some of Colt’s courses). Needless to say, it’s much less unattractive here.

If there were ever a question mark hole, it’s the Addington’s 400 yard eighth. The drive is straight uphill to a blind fairway, which doglegs left but slopes right. Many won’t even be able to reach the fairway. If you go more than about 220, the fairway narrows and runs down into the woods on both sides. The second demands accuracy too, especially in firm conditions like these. The cut down most of the trees on the right between my summer 2017 and 2018 visits so now you may not lose your ball if you hit it over there, but will have to play 50 yards blind uphill out of a valley.

The dogleg left ninth features two shots over the bridged ravines for which the Addington is famous. This hole played completely different on different visits to the Addington, the first of which was in April 2016 when the course was soft and the second two were in the summer when the course was…well, the color of the fairway in the first picture here tells you how the course was. The second ravine cuts the fairway off at about 250 on the left side and in April, I hit a nice 2-hybrid out there, it stuck in the fairway, and I had 150 yards. Straightforward.

I think I played this hole 5 or 6 times on my two summer visits…and I only managed to hit the fairway once, when I clubbed down to like a 6 iron. Several of those shots with my 4 iron were actually pretty good, but the fairway is convex and they all bounced through the fairway into the heather that separates this fairway from the tenth, Long story short…summer British fairways can make you look like a long drive champion or an idiot. I’m sure that Clayton et al will remove the little trees that the club has (‘have’ if you’re British…) planted between this and the tenth fairway.

The approach is beautiful (especially in summer with the tan grass and the heather in bloom) but the green is convex and quite tricky to hit.

I’d recommend going into the chute of trees behind the ninth green and playing the tenth from the back tee—otherwise you have to hook your drive around some pine trees. It’s a great driving hole from back there, about 220 to reach the upper part of the fairway. The second plays a bit longer than it seems. Again, the bunkers could use some work to match the visual drama of the course’s other elements.

One type of hole that I’ve definitely become less of a fan of over the years is the postage stamp par 3 surrounded by bunkers. It’s kind of an obvious thing to do and half the golfers will just go back-and-forth across the green from bunker to bunker. But the eleventh at the Addington might be my favorite of the type because the green is deep and the bunkers are at the front and back so that you don’t have to play a bunker shot into the shallowest aspect of the green with another on the other side.

So this is a big part of what you came for, the twelfth hole. Definitely one of the more famous holes of the British heathland courses and according to many people, one of the country’s great holes.

Not according to me. At least not in the summer of 2018. It starts with a blind where the fairway runs out at about 235 yards. In April, it was a simple long iron lay-up. But like the ninth, it was impossible in the summer. On my second visit, I played with some members who said that a lot of them just hit a driver to try to get to the bottom of the hole and if they lose the ball, oh well. Because you can lose your ball off a good lay up too as I found out.

This hole is famous for two things: (1) its majestic approach shot and (2) its tiered fairway. That aforementioned 235 yards is to the end of the main fairway. After that, the hole runs downhill but there are several tiers of fairway, almost like this were a par 3. Now this could be a perfectly functional oddity…if the ball could roll between the tiers. Instead, the slopes are covered with long grass and heather, so unless you get lucky and catch the steps or a spot where the grass is thin, you’ll get stuck on the hill between the tiers.

Now all that has a simple fix: just run a lawn mower over the heather and long grass. The justly famous approach shot is another matter. When you see old photographs of the course, none of the trees on the left were there. They make the 220 yard approach very awkward but they’re guilty of an even greater crime: if you have a look in the woods over there, you’ll see that the trees are growing on a bunch of mounds, just like those short of the green. Then you realize what this hole was originally about: the area left of the green was open and you could bank the ball off those mounds onto the green from the left. And this would have been a vital option in the summer when, free of trees, the ground was firm and fast because a shot to the right would run off down the (if those trees were removed) thirteenth. Simply put, I don’t think that there’s a hole in the world as much in need of tree removal as the twelfth at the Addington.

On top of all that, it’s one of the most interesting greens on the course. So while I don’t think that the version of the hole that I saw was very good, I’ve never seen a hole that had so much unfulfilled promise. If Clayton et al restore this hole the way that I suspect they will, it will be one of the greatest holes on a heathland course.

After all that, the next hole is…just one of the most famous long par 3s in the world. I have to admit to being not as big a fan of this hole as most seem to be. I like it when there’s ample room to run the ball onto a long par 3 and that’s pretty hard to do here because the slope up to the green is quite steep. One possibility would be to cut the trees down right of the green and maintain some of this slope as short grass, but while the trees weren’t there in the old photos that I’ve seen, it didn’t look like the hill was short grass. Some holes are just meant to be hard and I’m pretty sure that this was one of them.

On a clear day, you can see the London skyline in the background from the tee of the subtle, but excellent medium-short par 4 fourteenth. The genius here is in the slope of the fairway. While the drive is wide-open, unless you keep your ball tight up the left side, the slope will carry your ball off to the right onto the fifteenth hole. From there, you’ll have an uphill, blind shot over a bunker. If you keep your drive up the left as we see below, it’s a simple approach.

The fifteenth is another of the Addington’s tough long par 4s. The encroaching trees make the fairway look narrower than it is. It’s pretty wide open and you should take advantage of that by making your best trying-to-impress-the-trackman swing…because the second is quite uphill and plays long.

While the twelfth may be the hole that’s in most need of tree removal in the entire world, the short par 5 sixteenth is probably in the top 10 as well. I suspect that this would be one of the most visually spectacular holes in the world if they cut down all the trees because it plays in the same direction as number fourteen, so you’d see the London skyline, and the land is rolling and wild, with a green perched over a heather-filled ravine.

But unlike the twelfth, it was still an excellent hole in its 2018 suboptimal presentation. The drive is great—wide open on the right but if you hit out there, you won’t be able to reach the green in two and may even have an awkward lay up around trees. But you can also use the slope to sling a draw well down the fairway from where it’ll just be a mid-long iron into the green. That shot is currently claustrophobic, with the trees on the right really choking the last 200 yards of the hole out. I didn’t get a photo of it for some reason, but the shot from the lay up area to the green is a beauty.

N.B. there’s some interesting shaping in the trees to the left of driving zone which I suspect was a bunker. It’s certainly a good place for one, right at the corner of the dogleg. I asked the members that I played with if it had been one and they said no, but the trees in there are at least 50 years old so if I’m right, it probably hasn’t been a bunker since pre-WWII. I’m sure that Clayton et al will get to the bottom of this.

The seventeenth is a lovely medium-long par 3 with a nice bit of English quirk: you play over the sixteenth green. The bunkers short of the green are very attractive (a nice model for the rest of the bunkers) but the important thing to note is that they’re well short of the green. You’ve got a good 30 yards of fairway short that you can use to run the ball onto the green. This nicely balances the two other longer par 3s, nos. three and thirteen, which are both very exacting.

The long par 4 eighteenth isn’t one of the more interesting holes at the Addington but it’s a very good challenge. There’s a bunker on the left about 230 from the tips which, according to the members, catches quite a few balls. The fairway slopes right-to-left and I can imagine that it’d catch a lot of short hitters’ balls when it’s playing firm in the summer. The approach is to an elevated green and plays a good club uphill.

I played the Addington more than any other course during my three years in London: seven times in three visits. So I got to know the course pretty well. Despite the issues with the presentation, which are the most significant of any course that I played in the UK, it’s an excellent test of golf. The trees, slopes in the fairway, and, in the summer, the firmness make it a very stern test of driving. I guess that there’s some concern that some of this might be lost if they do a wholesale tree removal, but I’d imagine that Clayton et al will leave a few to keep some of the challenge. But I think the improvement in the aesthetics would be worth making it a bit easier off the tee. The Addington is a dramatic, hilly property and I suspect that it’d be one of the most visually spectacular courses in London (where there’s some good competition) if they opened up vistas across the course.